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.
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.