Sinosphere
[China has generally issued a few hundred green cards per year, and the recent uptick illustrates how the authorities are seeking to attract more foreign investors and celebrities, even though most recipients are still ethnically Chinese, analysts said.]
By
Mike Ives
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Stephon Marbury, the
former N.B.A. star who now plays for the Beijing Ducks,
during an all-star game
in Beijing in January. Last year he was one of 1,576
foreigners granted
permanent residency in China.
Credit Visual China
Group, via Getty Images
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HONG KONG — Stephon Marbury, a former N.B.A.
point guard who has forged a second career in the Chinese Basketball
Association, says he enjoys being a celebrity expatriate in Beijing.
“This is home away from home and I’m loving
it,” he wrote in a recent Twitter message that accompanied a video of him
eating at a Chinese hot pot restaurant.
Mr. Marbury, 40, is one of 1,576 foreigners
to be granted permanent residency in China last year. That figure represents a
163 percent year-on-year increase in a so-called green card program that began
in 2004, according to reports in the Chinese state news media.
China has generally issued a few hundred
green cards per year, and the recent uptick illustrates how the authorities are
seeking to attract more foreign investors and celebrities, even though most
recipients are still ethnically Chinese, analysts said.
But for many other foreigners in China, they
said, residency restrictions have increased since 2013, when a landmark
immigration law took effect, and the green card program remains exceedingly
small for a country of 1.3 billion people with about 600,000 foreign residents.
By contrast, the United States, with a
population of about 324 million, granted more than a million green cards in
2015, according to government data.
China’s immigration policies are
contradictory in that they prioritize attracting foreign talent to increase
economic modernization, while reflecting a deep-rooted instinct to keep
foreigners at arm’s length, said Frank Pieke, a professor of modern China
studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
He said the policies, much like those of
Japan and South Korea, were “predicated on a very strong nation state that
defines itself as the home of a particular ethnic and cultural group that wants
to maintain its purity and wants to let in only what it really, really
desperately needs.”
China’s 2013 law was the first major overhaul
of national immigration policy since 1985 and helped to lay the foundation for
a raft of new residency rules in China’s major cities.
In Shanghai, a 2015 rule relaxed the criteria
for green card eligibility for local foreign residents, said Becky Xia, a
Shanghai-based partner at Fragomen, an international immigration law firm.
Although applicants must still show four years of residency and a yearly salary
of at least 600,000 renminbi, or about $87,000, she said, the new rule no
longer requires them to be top executives.
Ms. Xia said that Fragomen had seen a 50
percent increase over the last year in clients seeking help with green card
applications. Most, she said, were Europeans in the information technology
sector who oversee manufacturing in China. She expected the number of green
cards issued in China to rise, she added, partly because foreigners in business
who have passed China’s retirement age — 60 for men and 55 for white-collar
women — are not eligible for work visas and could apply for green cards
instead.
From an employer’s perspective, “I would
think there are more options for getting the talent you want,” she said of
Shanghai’s new rules. She added that green cards, unlike work permits, were not
tied to employment contracts and were valid for renewable 10-year terms.
But Chinese immigration and residency
policies that have been enacted since 2013 have also become more restrictive
toward less valued workers, especially the African traders and entrepreneurs
who have settled in the southern city of Guangzhou since the early 2000s, often
by overstaying their visas, experts said.
Gordon Mathews, an anthropologist at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong who has studied communities of Nigerian traders
in Guangzhou, said that the police there had cracked down on people who had
overstayed their visas after dozens of Africans, mostly from Nigeria and Mali,
were arrested in an August 2013 drug raid.
Mr. Mathews said that many African and Arab
traders in Guangzhou overstayed their visas because the official limit on their
stays — typically two weeks or a month — often did not provide enough time to
commission a factory order and see it through to completion. But the government
appears unwilling to loosen that rule, he added, and foreign traders who obtain
legal residence permits are generally limited to one-year stays with no
guarantee of renewal, even if they have Chinese spouses or children.
“The whole issue is: Can foreigners become
Chinese?” he said. “Yes, I know there’s a green card system and so on. But on
the ground, it appears doubtful.”
China also has a naturalization process for
foreigners. This month, the state news media reported that two prominent
Chinese-born scientists had given up their United States citizenship to become
Chinese citizens: Chen Ning Yang, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1957, and Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, winner of the A. M. Turing Award for computer
science in 2000. Both are professors at Tsinghua University in Beijing and
members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
But successful cases are extremely rare. And
a new work permit system has placed restrictions on which foreigners will be
allowed to work in China.
The system, which came into effect in
November in nine cities and provinces, aims to build an information-driven
economy by “encouraging the top, controlling the middle and limiting the
bottom” of the pool of foreign workers, the state news media reported. It is
scheduled to go nationwide in April.
In practice, said Mimi Zou, an assistant law
professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the law makes it extremely
difficult for workers on the lowest tier to obtain work permits.
Demographers predict that China may
eventually face widespread shortages of low-skilled workers and that a more
liberal immigration policy could help stabilize its economy in the long term.
But because so many domestic migrants are still seeking work across the
country, Ms. Zou said, the government has not yet considered creating a guest
worker program for foreigners, an approach many developed countries have
embraced.
Ms. Zou said China could eventually address
labor shortages by bolstering its fertility rate or raising its retirement age,
or by investing in automation. Some of that investment is underway, she added,
and Chinese companies are outsourcing some low-skilled production to other
countries in Asia.
“But you obviously can’t outsource some jobs,
such as domestic work,’’ she said in an email.
Follow Mike Ives on Twitter @mikeives.
Karoline Kan contributed research from
Beijing.
