So any good path to migrate to China for permanent? (settle there)
From what I know you have to get a work visa first, and you can apply for PR after living and working in China for a few years.
You can apply all you like.
PRs are incredibly difficult to get. I’ve lived and worked in China for over 20 years and I won’t be able to successfully get one.
I’d be curious to know more. I’ve heard from people living in China that they were able to get PR after around a decade working there. They do mention that the process is difficult and it’s on case by case basis. Have you gone through the process and were you rejected?
I started the process and was given the plain message that it was a waste of time to continue.
There are specific things they’re looking for in people they give PRs to. Being ethnically Chinese at least partially helps a great deal. Having specific “high value” skills also helps a lot (though even with those skills it’s a crap shoot if you get it). Having certain political connections helps a lot too.
None of these are definitive, though. The bulk of expats don’t stand a chance. Even long-term expats like me who’ve married in, own real estate, started a business, etc. For all practical purposes the PR is unattainable.
If I moved to China it would be for political and ideological reasons more than anything else. On a tangent, why do Americans refer to themselves as expats as opposed to immigrants?
This is a whole other can of worms, but in the colloquial sense “expat” is a word a white immigrant uses to refer to themselves and other white immigrants. “Immigrant” is the term used for coloured people living in a different country than where they were born and grew up. The official definition for “expat” is a worker with temporary residency in a country for work; the person means to or has to return to their country of origin at some point. The term is rarely used like that though. Even if it were, we have the lovely “temporary foreign worker” or “guest worker” to refer to coloured or lower-class expats. So no matter which way you look at it the term “expat” is wrapped in racism.
a) I’m not an American. b) The term “immigrant” carries with it some sense of permanence that the word “expat” doesn’t. An immigrant aspires to permanent stay in the country. An expat does not.
As with most things there are blurry edges. I’ve been an expat for over 20 years, for example, which strains the bounds of this. But still, in the end, there’s a difference between someone in the country on a short term work visa (even if endlessly renewed) than someone going through the immigration procedure.
If you’ve lived in a country for over two decades, own property, and run a business there then you absolutely are an immigrant.
Detailed support policies listed in the guideline included promoting prenatal and postnatal care, further developing nursing systems, improving the mechanism for maternity leave and insurance, offering preferential house-purchase policies to families with more than one child, adding high-quality education resources, creating a fertility-friendly employment environment, and setting up a complete service system on population.
None of these address the elephant in the room: raising a child is expensive here. REALLY expensive. If they don’t address the actual, direct, out-of-pocket costs to parents, they’re not going to get their birth rate increase. All of these other things are fine. Nice. But not worth a wet slap if you literally can’t afford a child.
Aren’t things like maternity care, house purchasing, and so on out of pocket costs, and does the government provide any subsidies for parents currently?
“Promoting natal care” is not “paying for natal care”. “Preferential purchase policies” is not “paying for housing” either.
The major cost of raising a child here is education. It’s the gigantic elephant in the room and it’s the one that is not going away in any of these initiatives. If they don’t deal with that, they’re not going to get people having second children in any numbers, not to mention third.
Unfortunately it seems the people coming up with these solutions are vastly out of touch with the real world of parenting in China. They’re treating it as an “incentive” thing when it’s an “existential” thing. Almost every parent I know in China wants a second or third child. Yet most of them are not getting them because they can’t afford it. Until that divide is bridged, China’s population will continue running headlong into a wall of demographic collapse.
I don’t know much about cost education in China, could you elaborate more on this. Given that the government is pushing for domestic technological development and independence it would seem that making education accessible would be an important part of that.
Public education in China, after primary school, is free, but largely shit. (My son is in a public middle school and one that’s even well-regarded! I get to see the processes and outcomes with my own two eyes.) The teachers tacitly assume that the parents are shoving their children into so-called “cram schools” anyway, so they don’t do much of anything in the public school. They act like an enormous babysitting service. Even the recent ban on schools-for-profit hasn’t changed this. It’s just caused some problems for the larger cram schools for a while until they creatively reworded things so they’re not “for profit” despite profiting greatly.
So if you want your children to succeed in what is arguably the single most competitive work environment in the world, you send your children to extra classes or to private schools. (The people with the real money do both.) So while technically you can go through your schooling all the way with minimal cost (outside of books, uniforms, etc.) in reality, if you want your child to actually have a meaningful future, you spend through the nose to cause permanent mental and emotional scarring by making them live lives from dawn to dusk (and beyond!) slaving away at classes and homework.
And this shit costs. A lot.
My wife and I just bought a new home: a really nice four-bedroom apartment that’s conveniently located near a major commercial and transportation hub in Wuhan. That new home cost us less than my son’s education has thus far … and he’s only in grade 8 (starting next semester). We have a minimum of four more years of (more expensive) education to get him through senior middle school, and then the REAL costs start pouring in: universities don’t even have the pretense of a free path. You pay through your nose from day 1, and again, if you want the diploma that is issued at the end to have any meaning, you pay for the expensive “famous” universities. A degree, for example, from Wuhan University (ranked ~8 nationwide) or Huazhong University of Science and Technology (~10) will carry a whole lot more weight than a degree from Hankou University (~650). Can you guess which ones require you to basically mortgage your soul to pay the fees? (This is also handwaving over the whole exam thing. The pressure cooker that kills a scary number of children each year by suicide.)
And this isn’t likely to change because the government knows that the Chinese will pay anything to get their children educated. Chinese veneration of education predates the People’s Republic of China by a couple of millennia, after all. And until the rather out-of-touch senior Party members, who’ve never had to make any meaningful sacrifice to fund their children’s educations, figure out that this is the single largest expense any child-rearing involves there won’t be a lot of third children, and indeed not very many second, even.
I’m sure your analysis is quite accurate for your financial demographic, but it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that people in general won’t have more kids because education is competitive. This is largely a problem for upper class people as opposed to majority of the population.
Again, assumptions.
I’m not upper class. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
And the assumption that it’s only the upper class that wants their children well-educated betrays very western assumptions about how people think.
I’m going to guess your financial situation is a tad better off than the median given what you’ve described about it already. You’re also twisting what I said, which isn’t that people don’t care about their children being well-educated, rather that not being able to afford tutoring won’t prevent people from having kids.
Meanwhile, you’re making lots of assumptions there yourself. I grew up in USSR, people very much valued having education for their kids there. Those who could afford it got additional tutoring, but that was also a small percentage of the population.
