China Wants to Attract More Foreigners (of a Certain Kind)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
