Different Types Of China Visa
There are loads of variants of China visas in existence, but if you’re a normal traveller, normal business visitor, or illegal EFL teacher (did I say illegal? I meant “normal”), you will only be interested in the following three varieties:
L
= TOURIST VISA
“L” stands for ‘lame’ because who would want this crappy, overpriced, limited pseudo visa? Don’t get this visa unless it is your first time entering China, or unless you really are going to China for only one day and you don’t want to pay any more than is necessary.
The above L visa is not too bad because it runs for three months.
The pretty, expensive version, available from the bureaucratic, humourless official China Visa section of the Foreign Affairs office in Wan Chai:
As you can see, this visa expires after 30 days, which is roughly enough time to visit the McDonald’s at the Badaling Great Wall (as pictured on the visa), but not enough time to settle down into Laowai life.
People with L visas are required to wear a camera round their neck at all times and use their street map to hunt for McDonald’s in every town.
F
= BUSINESS VISA
This is the cool visa that you want to get.
It does not actually entitle you to do anything in China apart from mosey around. You are not allowed to do business, have a job, earn money, sign contracts, engage in reactionary journalism, practice religion, own a house, live in China in any remotely permanent way, touch Chinese girls’ bottoms, or otherwise do all the things you want to do in China. However, what you are supposed to be allowed to do, and what everyone in reality does, are two very different things. As usual in China.
So… with this visa you can pretty much come in and out of China and travel around inside China without anyone asking any questions. If anyone does ask you any questions you can mysteriously reply “I am here… on beeznesss”.
Z
= WORKING VISA
Z visas are a major red-tape hassle to obtain, and you can’t apply for it yourself – you need an official and very patient Chinese sponsor.
This visa does actually entitle you to have a job and earn a living in China. It however does not entitle you to live in China. Nice one that. If you want to live in China, as presumably you do, since your job is there, you have to go through a separate procedure to obtain a Residence Permit, which differs from place to place, but is generally some sort of green bit of paper from your local Public Security Bureau saying “we know where you live”. No one knows why this is necessary any more (apart from generating some money from registration fees), and no one that we know has ever been asked to produce his/her residence permit by anyone. This is probably because so few people have it, even the police are unaware of its existence.
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The China Residence Permit – A Rare Sighting
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The permit makes sure to remind you that (a) you are a Foreigner; (b) this permit is only temporary; and (c) you are supposed to hand it over when you leave China. We can categorically advise you not to do this: what if you leave for one day – how are you supposed to get it back? Like everything about the residence permit, nobody knows, and if even if someone told you, it wouldn’t be logical anyway.
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If you have a working visa you have the privilege of being legal in China – as long as your company is employing you for the purpose stated in the application and that purpose of employment is within the legal scope of their company. You may be a teacher with a Z visa and still not be legal because your dodgy (read- normal) language school employer is actually registered as a general business service company to dodge all the bureaucratic hassles of being an accredited educational institution. So you would have the Z visa but still be illegal. AND you would have the extra privilege of now having to pay tax on your salary. AND if (when) you fall out with your current employer, you can’t transfer your working visa to a new employer (unless your ex employer is very nice to you for some reason), so to change jobs in theory you would have to go out of China and get a new visa until you can apply for a new Z visa. Or you could simply keep the Z visa until it expires and just be illegal for a while just like you would be with the F anyway.
PS – final digression about Z visas. If the form-filling and office-visiting wasn’t enough to put you off applying for the official working visa, part of the process seems to be that the police will come to inspect your place of work and inter(rog…)view you there. This will generally happen at a time convenient to them and not to you. This could be a major inconvenience to any other foreigners who are subsequently spotted working in the same place, if they for whatever strange reason aren’t taking the path of legality…
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