I recently tried going down the route of getting the license in Chongqing also a no go. As I need to have a perminant residency permit in order to obtain a license. I actually just found out now as I called the guy to make sure, luckily I did because the first time my girlfriend called him and she didn't know the different between the permanent and temporary resident permits. He had already told her the situation of the permits and she misunderstood, that misunderstanding got me excited for 2 weeks thinking I can get the license there.

Anyway,
I'm back to square one again