Explaining China's visa policies

Less tourists
by Mr_Stein via FlickrMore than once I have been asked over the past few weeks to give my take on the recent changes in the way China is issuing its visas.
Since April desperate people are standing in front of China's visa offices wondering whether the country has gone crazy. Students, business people with F and L visas have to leave the country over the summer and for the business people it is very unclear whether they will be able to return, even though many have worked for almost a decade in China. Angry business people in Hong Kong have to go back to Europe to apply for a short-term visas, after having been able for a long time to get them on the spot. Business people with a Z-visa in Beijing do not get an extension, because the relevant authorities decided their degrees were no longer up to standards, although they had been in the capital working on Z-visas for ages. Tourists are re-booking their trips to China, because they cannot get the visas they need; business conferences are rescheduled for the same reason.
The economic damage on the middle and long term seems unavoidable, although hard to assess at this stage. On the short term tourism, hotels, airline companies, restaurants are already hurt by a dropping number of visitors. European airline companies are actually reducing the prices of tickets to China despite rising oil prices, to attract more customers. Chinese airline companies have been cutting massively in flights.
Again the question: have China's leaders gone gaga? It might help to get a bit of insight in the ways how policies in China are being made. That understanding won't help you when you are standing in front of the counter at a visa office, but it can explain the logic behind it.

Most people who are not familiar with the country see it as a top-down, well-organized country, where Beijing is calling the shots. They blame "China" when things go wrong. But China is much less organized than most people think it is. Its government consists of rather independent units that have command lines that go vertically, horizontally and diametrically; on top of that internal relations between those government entities vary from place to place and change very often. It is a matrix structure where seldom one person is in charge.
One of those smaller entities is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, important, but compared to other entities like the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Communist Party rather hapless. That is not an easy position, since they have to explain often to the outside world the unexplainable. When the PLA decides to shoot down a satellite or ban the US-flagship Kitty Hawk from entering Hong Kong, the officials at the ministry of foreign affairs often have to read this in the Western media. They are certainly not told in advance.
What is clearly their prerogative is issuing visas outside mainland China. Within officially established rules their have a fair large bandwidth in interpreting those rules. In the past years, in line with China's opening up policies, they have gone pretty far in stretching that bandwidth in favor of those applying for visas. There were rules to follow, and incidentally they would reverse interpretations. Last year for example the F-visas, in Hong Kong routinely issued for one year, were only issued for six months. But mostly foreign visitors in China enjoyed a large degree of freedom. The issuing of visas inside China is the prerogative of the local police and that leave some room for locally different practises in following the visa rules.

When the country started to prepare for the Beijing Olympics all government entities were under orders to do their best to make this international event into a success. I'm sure that at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs they must have had long meetings to discuss what they could do. And actually, there was not so much they could do, apart from changing their routines in issuing visas. And since their policies were already fairly liberal, they could only thigthen the rules.
Didn't they realize that kicking out thousands of students and business people at great personal expense, keeping business people and tourists out of the country would have a negative fallout? Maybe they did, but that is not their business. They had to prove they were doing whatever they could to prepare for the Beijing Olympics.
Some people have suggested that the change in the interpretation of visa rules is part of a bigger ploy, to change China really into a country where rules are really rules. By kicking out all those illegally working foreigners, the country would give a signal. I do not believe is such a connection. There is no proof for that and besides, too many innocent people and companies are being hurt in their interests now.

I'm sure that many people, companies, embassies and other organization are currently thinking about strategies to reverse the current strict interpretation of the existing visa rules.Of course, formal protest at the ministry of foreign affairs should be on that agenda, but would have rather little effect, because of the logic I just tried to describe: the ministry has no other way. But there are many state entities who must realized the possible economic impacts of the current change: airline companies, hotels, tax offices, ministries of economic affairs and other Chinese companies who deal a lot with foreign companies. Organizing a lobby through them would be a smart idea.