China offers 10-year visas to 'high end talent' | Hacker News Reader

China offers 10-year visas to 'high end talent'

bbc.co.uk

35 pointsdberhane60 comments

> Visa holders will be allowed to remain in the country for up to 180 days at a time

So Nobel prize winning academics can visit China. I'm rather less excited by that than when I read the headline

Anyone living in the West who looks down on certain US politicians for their anti-immigrant sentiments but is fine with China's state enforced ethnic nationalism might want to stop and think deeply as to why.

It's essentially impossible for a Westerner to gain anything more than a temporary visa, even if they marry a Chinese citizen.

> Anyone living in the West who looks down on certain US politicians for their anti-immigrant sentiments but is fine with China's state enforced ethnic nationalism

... is probably not a significant amount of people

Do you think living in the West...is fine with China's state enforced ethnic nationalism is a big group of people?

I'll just point you to the Assange phenomenon. When Assange was an agent (provided a platform) bringing light to the consequences of W's and Obama's wars in the middle east, he was a hero.

Then, one day he also became conduit to information which lead to the political death of an anointed successor to the Obama presidency and he became a traitor, a misogynist, an enemy most foul -a Russian agent, in their eyes.

So, yeah. Many people like China when it's expedient, and will forgive those little sins. You know balance against hegemony, economic rival, bearers of Mao's torch, the divinity of marginalized peasants who stick it to urban elites, etc.

> Then, one day he also became conduit to information which lead to the political death of an anointed successor to the Obama presidency and he became a traitor, a misogynist, an enemy most foul.

I think Assange was painted as a mysogynist in the global press right back in 2010 when details of his extradition request for a suspected rape came out. That was early in the Obama administration. I see your point but I think the chronology is off. Perhaps those people that are closer to Assange and know him better would know if he should have been criticised as a mysogynist even earlier?

I think a better way to criticise China is to review the recent release of documents about Tiananmen Square.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-42465516

I don't really get your example. There were plenty of people that were critical of Assange well before 2016 and plenty of people that continue to praise him today.

So I have trouble with Julian->Large numbers of China apologists, it just isn't very sound logic.

> There were plenty of people that were critical of Assange well before 2016 and plenty of people that continue to praise him today.

A lot for the people that continue to praise him today are people that were critical of him before 2016 (and vice versa.)

People who praised him yesterday are not the people praising him today, rather they now denounce him, despite his remaining steadfast and resolute. The opposite is also the case, people denouncing him anti American now see him as an ally.

It's to exemplify that people will ignore what you see as incongruent, if it does not align with their motives.

That may be the mainstream view but he was considered a Russian tool since 2012 when he started working with RT and had known Russian "friends" working with him at WikiLeaks.

I was never a fan of Assange, only the people who took on the personal risk to leak.

The policy is repugnant on multiple levels.

Hearing all the negative stuff about China recently, like the online censorship, dictatorship, stories about people not caring about human life, like hearing it's common that if you accidentally drive over people, many will backup to finish the job so they wont' have to pay the insurance for rest of the life and seeings stories like babies on the streets and nobody caring, why would anyone want to work in China?

Are these stories true, or just negative propaganda to threaten the great republic of China ? Anybody care to share experiences living there ?

I can recommend a YouTube channel from a couple Westerners who have lived in China for years and share their experiences about it, https://www.youtube.com/advchina -- the slightly older of whom is http://youtube.com/serpentza who lives in Shenzhen.

They tackle a lot of the issues you bring up. China is very protective of their immigration, and unlike the US, it's impossible to get the equivalent of a Green Card or become a citizen at all, even if you marry a Chinese person, which they both have done. You constantly have to jump through hoops to keep a current Visa, and as a foreigner you must report in person to the nearest police station each month to be monitored, or face deportation.

The police will also sometimes randomly come to your apartment unannounced, and come in to check on you.

There exists a huge range of living situations that span from the more western first tier cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen, that are very organized, with a police presence that cuts down on lawless driving, unlicensed food vendors, etc, to the more rural areas where the bulk of the population still lives.

Anyway, they both cover a lot of the issues you raise, and have a ton of good videos that give you a sense of what contemporary life is like there.

The apartment thing...it’s very rare. Most likely to remind you to register at the PSB, I was always late and warned a few times, they never tried to fine me or anything. They aren’t really “checking” on you, honestly I’ve had worse experiences in Switzerland than China where they really do check on you (like the television tax guy entering my apartment to check that I really didn’t have a TV!).

Beijing was actually more lawless than the other first tier cities. The police are kind of paralyzed when they could easily pull over someone with enough guanxi to end there careers.

Wow, I hadn't considered that the Beijing police would be too fearful to inadvertently pull over a high ranking party member to conduct their jobs properly.

Meanwhile, for contrast regarding fear of politicians: In my London borough, my local ex Member of Parliament a few years back praised police after they used anti-terror powers to stop him while he was taking pictures of a bike path...

Television licencing property checks are normal in the UK as well - I've had a few inspectors demand access to my home to verify that I wasn't watching TV illegally. For a long time there used to be "TV detector vans" that would drive around areas supposedly detecting TVs in use in unlicensed properties - I believe it was ( still is? ) illegal to publish any information surrounding the efficacy of these vehicles ( Obviously because they don't work ).

> Obviously because they don't work

In the days of analogue TV, they almost certainly did. Analogue CRT televisions put out a tremendous amount of spurious RF. The intermediate frequency from the receiver's local oscillator was easily detected from some distance, even with inexpensive amateur equipment. With more sophisticated equipment, it wouldn't be difficult to see exactly what was on the screen using Van Eck phreaking. With modern technology, you could build a working TV detector bicycle using nothing more than an Android tablet, an RTL-SDR stick and a home-made yagi.

I think that the secrecy was about how often TV detection technology was actually used. The BBC research department could have knocked together a working TV detector van in a spare afternoon, but it would have been prohibitively expensive to operate. Why send out two skilled broadcast engineers in a van full of equipment, when an empty van being driven by a debt collector will do the job?

Yes, I was saying that the vans themselves obviously don't work, evidenced by the legislation - not that it's technologically infeasible. It does however reflect on the nature of the UK that an effectively private organisation is granted legal protections to assist them in enforcing a monopoly over a technology with a racket, that looks a lot like something out of a dystopian fantasy.

> I've had a few inspectors demand access to my home to verify that I wasn't watching TV illegally

Ask to see their warrant or tell them to get lost. They have no power of entry, possibly unless accompanied by the po po (in which case ask the same question and "Am I legally obliged to comply with this officer?", while videoing them and their response).

Confirmation: http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi-administering-the-lic...

> Enquiry officers do not have any legal powers to enter your home without a search warrant granted by a magistrate (or sheriff in Scotland). > You have no obligation to grant entry to an enquiry officer if you don’t wish to do so.

Fortunately you have no obligation to allow TV inspectors access to your property and you can call the police on them if they continue to harass you.

I love these guys. Came here to link them. I suggest anyone watch these videos. They cover those topics as well as Visa issues and censorship.

I've lived and done a fair amount of business there. The car thing is true. I would say people there care a lot more about their immediate network of friends / family and a lot less about anyone else. It's very safe to live there, but at the same time everyone's trying to take advantage of everyone else - literal and metaphorical pickpockets are everywhere.

The inherent lack of trust makes workplace environments really difficult. Everyone's looking out for number one (themselves), to the point of damaging their own company for personal gain. You have no clue how hard it is to build a software dev team when ANY of the developers will happily copy the source code they have access to onto a thumbdrive and sell it to your top competitor for a modest payday. I highly respect anyone who builds a software team successfully in China, such a headache.

Frankly, the internet censorship was the deal breaker for me. No Google, gmail, facebook, twitter, news, etc, is just too much to bear.

But the food was really good, good weather and foreigners are treated like minor celebrities (everyone is really really friendly), so we don't experience real China like everyone else.

yup, I've heard many stories of expats turning around and leave the second they found the internet frustrating, which is strange that they didn't do their homework before coming.

Also, the food I found ok; lack of variety (hot pot, shaokao, dumpling, repeat), and no good international cuisines. You can also get safer Chinese food in Taiwan or Los Angeles. As for weather, it's usually made worse by pollution. And recently, foreigners have been treated with disdain by locals because of nationalism.

The internet was actually fine for a long time (just proxy over SSH for everything). But they randomly "turn up the dials" on the firewall to block SSH and so you'll get intermittent outages. It's gotten progressively worse. We had a bunch of servers outside of China and I would need to basically round robin them to keep online.

I was actually somehow impressed by how sophisticated the firewall became over time from a pure technology point of view. Super annoying though.

to be clear, white foreigners are treated like minor celebrities.

White foreigners are treated like celebrities in almost every non-western country.

That’s what we sort of mean by white previlege. Thanks to Hollywood movies and music + beauty ads with predominantly white people.

When you go back, using Google Fi and hotspotting has been a fantastic experience.

Fi is so hilariously overpriced that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously buying into it. Is $20 + $10/GB actually the cheapest available.. anywhere?

The car thing is true, but it is more prevelant among the blue trucks. One of my friends lost a father this way. However, it isn’t that common. Sometimes you’ll encounter some guy in the middle of the street lying down waiting for someone to help them, who they will then accuse of causing them to be hurt in the first place...chinese law and police just aren’t developed enough to avoid these kinds of scams. However, it isn’t super common anymore, and you have to find a grizzled expat to bear these stories.

For the most part they are just stories you talk about in a bar. It won’t effect you personally, not like the air pollution which finally convinced me to leave.

We probably hear mostly about the sensationally negative things the most because they drive clicks.

The same could be said about all the negative news coming out of the US. Why would anyone want to move there? And yet they do, and many thrive.

I'm sure China is thriving, despite its problems.

The problem is best illustrated with things like road deaths.

If you look at road deaths for China, it’s something like 20 per 100k people per year vs maybe 2-3 in the UK.

What that means is, statistically China is 8-10 times “worse” than the UK.

Does it mean you’re going to be seeing car crashes everywhere all the time? No.

Does it mean China’s road safety is much worse? Yes.

Things are much worse in China in a variety of meaningful respects. Does that mean it’s impossible to live there? Not at all.

If we instead go onto crime;

If you look at violent crime we have 6 times more robberies, 4 times more murders and 18 times more gun crime in the USA compare to China (per capita)

Does it mean you're going to be seeing people getting shot everywhere all the time? No.

Does it mean general safety in the US is much worse? Yes.

Things are much worse in USA in a variety of meaningful respects. Does that mean it's impossible to live there? Not at all. Well, if you can stand having Trump as the president of the country you live in.

General safety is worse in china if you include traffic accidents. Crime safety is better in china.

You are unlikely to be affected in any case. Though I did know of stupid foreigners who became crippled after stupidity on motor scooters.

Adding to the other comments if you thought the whole rhino horn medicine idea was bad wait till you hear about inflicting pain to animals to make the meat more delicious.

Having just been in Beijing and Shanghai for a significant period of time, I can say both of those cities are fairly modern with a flair of western living standards (aside from the fact that most people don't speak English). I can't speak to anywhere else, though I'm excited to visit a number of more rural cities this year.

It's pretty true, speaking from experience. China is a pretty harsh place to live. But since this is hacker news, here are some links:

- Viral footage shows bystanders doing nothing as Chinese woman is attacked in hotel https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/06...

- Preschools across China to be inspected after ‘series of child abuse cases’ http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2121495/presc...

- Air pollution suspected for sharp rise in China lung cancer rate http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2106410/air-p...

- In China, the water you drink is as dangerous as the air you breathe https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals...

- Man in China sentenced to five years' jail for running VPN https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/22/man-in-china-s...

- Steam Community allegedly banned in China https://dotesports.com/general/news/steam-banned-china-19631

- The disappeared: Accounts from inside China's secret prisons http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/23/asia/china-lawyers-disappeared...

I would say from who I meet at expat bars/events in China, 80% of them are English teachers. They're there because there's no other skillsets for them to utilize in their home country, or they're just seeking new experiences before going back home. the rest 20% are there because their companies sent them there (but they'll go back sooner or later)

Money talks.

I’m not sure what the big deal is here, they have offered something like this for awhile, and in my experience, is nearly impossible to obtain unless you’ve won a Nobel (and not the peace kind). Most of us were just on work visas that were renewed yearly, the lucky ones got two year visas. Someday that might change, but I’m not sure how it would make things much better.

Looked into the taxes: for regular employees there are 7 brackets. Anything over 80,000RMB (12320 US Dollar) is taxed at 45%. Though it looks like if your income is derived by a company outside China, and you live there for >=1 and <= 5 years, you are exempted from taxes. Freelancers have 3 levels (between 20% to 40%).

[1] https://www.ecovis.com/focus-china/individual-income-tax-iit...

Important to note that those figures are for monthly income, not yearly.

Chinese taxes are a bit higher than the states, but note that is an all inclusive rate (federal, local). There are also many ways to get some income tax free for foreigners via special exemption (say around 10%) so it is only a bit more than USA taxes in the end (I filed the foreign tax credit form way too many times so have done the math a lot).

This is actually lower than the US in a few places, including California where the top bracket including local, state, and federal taxes can go up to 52%. On mobile so don't have a reference on me.

Sure, though coming from Washington state that wasn’t much solace. Even without state taxes, it some how worked out that I was fairly even with my USA federal tax liability, probably because the deductions are different in china.

I feel bad about paying taxes to a one party dictatorship. If you qualify for this visa you have lots of opportunities in life to change stuff for the better and turning this visa down is one of them.

I think I'll pass, too many restrictions and gotchas. This is why we left Hong Kong after the handoff in 96.

How does this work along with their plan to limit city population?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/26/chinas-shangha...

There are so few foreigners in China relative to locals that they barely budge any population statistics.

I received a 10 year visa and would certainly not call myself Nobel level. Fairly straightforward process, but you do need to provide quite a few personal details

I have a 10 year visa to China from the United States. It's just a tourist visa though. I think it's a special agreement between the two countries.

You can only stay for ninety days at a time on a tourist visa (the point of which is to prevent you from taking a job and sticking around)

Ten-year-visa really sounds like "come and do your things, but then go away, we don't really want you"

What they don't tell you is that two of those ten years will be spent in a secret gulag for writing a wechat private message to your friend about how you dont like the great firewall of china. Thanks, but I'll pass.

You could also just... not send WeChat private messages to your friend about how you don't like the great firewall of China.

I mean, I don't support the Firewall in the slightest, but I think the kind person who wants to send messages like that is exactly who they want to keep out by keeping brutal punishments for dissident behavior.

I've always felt if you go to a country you should respect it's laws, and if you feel you'll be unable to respect it's laws due to moral conflict you shouldn't go to the country.

And it's not like you should want to benefit from a country (or let a country benefit from you!) that has laws you're so opposed to that you'd be willing to risk severe punishment to comment on them...

Inflammatory troll commenter spotted...

It's nice to get a 10-year visa, but having to look over your shoulder every day in fear that the government is going to kidnap you for some random thing you said privately to your friend, that is a real concern. Tell the thousands of people who sit in prison cells for doing just that they are trolls.

Also 10 years prison for anyone that criticizes the government.

Decisions, decisions.

It is tempting.

Uk us a better visa imo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com