A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall... (THE VISA NIGHTMARE!)

Ruth,
How long left on yours?

Expired on the 19th.  Started the rounds of PSB offices on the 17th.  Apparently it has been in the third office for one week and that's that amount of time they require, so Ms FAO should be picking it up as I type.  She's not fussed about it.  Her boss says, no problem as long as the process is started before the expiration date.  They aren't the ones sitting here with no visa.

I dunno...sometimes tit-for-tat works out OK. Some of it may be helpful or necessary in the long run...the USA in particular has just gotten NUTS when it comes to getting a visa. Maybe if this started going both ways, things would lighten up a little?

Having said that, I stand corrected. I guess I've gotten a bit burned out on Asia in general, and its showing up in my conclusions and judgment. Statement withdrawn and replaced with: "I'm tired of Asia."

No...I agreed with what you said 100%. I just don't think it's necessarily the case in China...yet, anyway. But absolutely no correction implied!

There doesn't seem to be any obstacles re. visa in Denmark. See, we're the happy people, prone to spending oodles of moolah when travelling, so everyone loves us...

Oh, stop that. You guys are just gassed drunk and easy to rob.

Just saw you, Ruth...in most places won't be a problem unless you want to travel. Hope it works out soon...

Heavy duty grapevine is telling me that anyone over 60 and anyone here for more than 5 years is being told to go home when their contract finishes.  Good friends who ahve been here for years are now headed to Taiwan to work.

News to me! I've got new papers.

That's good.  They rang me to check how long I'd been here - hit the 5 year mark in January.  It's happened to them, other teachers in their school and also to friends of their in Shanghai. 

They figured they were lucky to find out now, because they wanted their contract fixed before they went on holidays.  Otherwise they wouldn't have found out until August when they came back.

I am over 60, 64 1/2.  I just got my 1 year visa back yesterday.  I have only been in China for 3 years - next year will make 4. 

I got my new Z visa a couple of weeks ago and it was only for 3 months and it was 400rmb.  Are the one year Z visa's available again now?

I got mine on Friday and it is good until July31/09.

Could someone explain this five year rule? It's pretty clear in my contract: must only work for five continuous years in China, next job in China should be two years after.
There are members here who have been in China for more than five years, right?
Is there somewhere around this rule, except for getting married?

I don't know. I didn't have a Z visa 5 years in a row. And I don't think it is an actual rule. I heard something about employment at the same place but not about being in China. May be it has to do with being here for 5 years without leaving the country. Normally you have to exit at least once a year so you don't have any problems with extending your visa.

5-year rule: Strange but true, there is a body of rules out there that supposedly governs the conditions under which we can enter and live and work in China. These rules apparently include a 5-year cap on continuous employment in China by foreigners. I think this is more employment than residence...as far as I can tell it doesn't come up if you change jobs within 5 years.

Why? They don't really want us settling in here and getting things like tenure, influence, or legally-mandated benefits.

Also: in many contracts, I think including clauses deep in the bowels of the SAFEA rules, there are specifications for the required qualifications a prospective teacher should have. One of those states that the teacher should be no more than 60 years old.

Why? Think: major medical problems...and bills.

This stuff has been on the books a long time. What's really changed is the level of enforcement.

Even now, though, specifics change from place to place and person to person. Public schools and unis are subject to more rules than private schools. Enforcement can be spotty at best. I personally have been lurking about here for well over 5 years, and it's never even come up...and I know many other folks here who can say the same. I've also known a lot of folks here who were well over 60...and had no trouble getting jobs or visas.

Hola!

About May of last year (2007), I was beating the bushes for a university teaching position. There were two schools who weere interested in me, the Zhejiang Forestry University, and Zhejiang U. of Technology (ZUT).

I was communicating with one fellow who really seemed like he really wanted to hire me, and when can I come and see the school and sign the contract and all that jazz. The college was not in Hangzhou but in a town about 45 minutes away. The town seemed nice and the school was beautiful. However, the guy who recruited me was gone, and the girl in the office for whatever reason took a disliking to me, and liked my resume' even less. She told me about the "five year rule", something that I have read over the internet but never quite believed. I think she wanted to get rid of me.

That girl was OK. This next girl was a flaming c*nt wad. About a week later, the ZUT school wanted to meet me, so off I went on another loooooooooooooooooooooooooong ride to get to their school (why are Chinese colleges way out in the middle of nowhere?).

I see the girl, and she wanted to see my passport. My passport is getting old, with a lot of old stamps and crap in it. She started fingering through it. She asked "Where is your visa?" I took the book back and pointed at my current stamp. "No, this is a Residence Permit, where is your visa." She was fingering through the old China stamps and found the last (Z) stamp I had with the word "VISA". The bitch said "You haven't had a working visa since 2004, how is that." I got a little under the collar and showed her my new stamp "This is what they gave me!" She talked down to me and said "As I said before, this is not a visa, this is a residence permit." I had enough and grabbed my shit and walked out the door.

The deal is, she was wrong, because since 2005, the Visa and the Residence Permit is the same stamp (since a visa is more or less a permission for an alien to have residence, right?) I didn't know, and my pervious job was kind of dodgy, so I went to the police station and met a woman who looked at my passport, said that there was no problems and hired me to work at her school (at 1,000 more a month and a 2,000 rental allowance)

The five year rule makes me sweat too a little bit too, however, last year I was here 6 years and was issued a visa/res. permit. I am more worried about some pervert or idiot foreigner doing something stupid here which puts us all in a bad light. I want these Olympics to be over.

Getting my visa/res. permit, masterbation license on Friday. Wish me luck.

Senor

Good luck Senor. Seems we'll be sharing stomping grounds in the near future.

The Aus Gov't does not see this as an Olympics thing, but as a long-term tightening up on foreigners in China.

n the fine tradition of bureaucratic shifts in China, the new policy has not been fully explained, and the uncertainty has precipitated furious discussions among expats about what the rules mean and how long they will remain in place.

"The hottest topic in China at present is the visa issue," Gary Bowerman writes in the latest China Business News.

He notes that a seminar held at the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai recently took the view that "the new visa issuing rules, though being implemented in advance of the Olympic Games, are not specifically for the Olympic period but will most likely remain in place as part of a reform of China's immigration practice".

"Those hoping for 'a return to the old days' in October will be disappointed."

If you're looking for the offshoot about checking into hotels, I moved it to a new thread of its very own. It's easy to see, and in the same board as this thread.