Have tickets for Olympics? But can't get a visa?
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Beijing,
China
Saturday, June 7, 2008
From China Daily and Shanghai List, this update. Now you would think that if you hold a ticket for an Olympic event, you should easily get a China visa? Wrong.
From the highly authoritative People's Daily:
The Beijing Olympics official website recently released "A guide to Chinese law for Foreigners coming to, leaving or staying in China during the Olympics" (hereinafter referred to as "the Guide"). The Guide points out that ticketholders for the Olympic Games from overseas will not automatically be granted a visa. They still need to apply for a visa from China's overseas embassies.
Fons Tuinstra of China Herald fills us in on the latest visa rumours:
* L and F visa extensions will not be offered from July 1 onwards, not even 30-day extensions:
"Under normal circumstances, most passport holders could get extensions for 30 days simply by paying a fee. Extensions and visas valid up to July 1 can be obtained, not beyond. This is what I have been told by 3 visa agents in Beijing," writes a user on the LP Thorntree "Visa Sticky" thread). Reports are generally saying that after June 30th there will be no more visa extensions. If you arrive after 1 July, you will only get 30 days with no option of extensions until some time in fall. "Interns and short-term project workers are required to apply for a Z visa if an uninterrupted stay in China is required," reports the Beijinger.
* Z visa holders are now coming under greater scrutiny now it seems, as the Globe and Mail reports. Apparently people are now getting their Z visas revoked:
Daniel Yeung is still trying to understand how it happened. After eight years of steady employment, the Canadian recruitment consultant is being kicked out of China, forced to join an exodus of foreigners streaming out of the host country ahead of the Beijing Olympics...
...when he tried to renew his work visa this spring, the Chinese authorities rejected his application. They said his educational qualifications, a diploma in physiotherapy, were inadequate for his job and he must have a bachelor's degree if he wanted to work as a consultant in China. It didn't matter that his employers were happy with his work, or that he was performing a useful service...
...One of his friends, a Norwegian businessman who owns his own company in China, is being kicked out this summer after 10 years in China because the government said he must have a graduate degree, Mr. Yeung
And here's some comments posted on
said.http://shanghaiist.com/2008/06/06/go_ahead_buy_yo.php
I think it's just as likely that Beijing is overreacting in the nerves department. Not just higher profile foreign businessmen, but even students and lowly tech guys are finding their leases "unrenewable" for a myriad of reasons.
Ironically, in advance of an Olympics show designed to propel China further forward in the arenas of world popularity, public image, and investor excitement, there is an odd feeling to me of sliding backward in time.
I guess I should correct myself--not a reaction to the Olympics so much as a reaction to March 14th, and the chaos that followed, all of it then pressurized even more by the Olympics, which pressure was partially responsible for the overreaction on March 14 to begin with.
So, Beijing's completely nervous about everything looking as good as possible leading up to the Olympics, perfectly logical to be so; then overreacts horribly in Lhasa. The resultant world outcry was so horrifying, in turn, to CCP leadership, that it is regressing even further into a past we all remember and fear, filled with crackdowns and random searches and people disappearing in the night.
I'm not slamming China--here in the US we've gone down similar roads lately, on a smaller scale.
2. From Icecat77
Roughly comparable? At least after jumping through the hoops the U.S. government sets up, there is a potential endpoint. If you do everything right you can get permanent residence or even citizenship. However, in China if you don't have a drop of pure Han blood (or minority blood?) you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of staying for longer than a year. (Wait, you could also invest billions of dollars and stay for 5 years at most)
I ran into the same problem with my Z visa. I was doing sales, but my degree wasn't in sales. I don't know many universities that have "sales" degree programs because anybody who has the ability to convince people to buy stuff can do sales, it's not like advanced particle physics. Apparently in the Chinese technocracy, degrees get that specific, however, most universities in the US don't even list your major on the degree (just BA, BS). It really says something about China's gratefulness to its investors when they kick people out who have been contributing to their development for so long.
You could call them comparable if the associated bureaucracies and regulations were both efficient and clear cut. Unfortunately, as frustrating as the American bureaucracy is at times, it still has China beat. (It took the government 3 months to even admit there were any changes/belated enforcements regarding visas.) I mean seriously, this comparability argument is the equivalent of trying to clean the crap off an ugly pig.
