Foreign business groups yesterday praised the easing of restrictions on permitting Chinese nationals to work in Taiwan for foreign multinationals, a change they said is vital to achieving the government's goal of making the country a regional logistics center.
But foreign executives said the government has yet to establish solid, clear regulations that could be implemented smoothly and truly facilitate the movement of Chinese business people across the Strait.
"It's a big step forward," said Guy Wittich, CEO of the European Council of Commerce and Trade (ECCT), who attended Tuesday's meeting with the Mainland Affairs Council that drafted the new policy.
"We had concrete problems of multinational companies with a branch office here wanting to invite their staff from the People's Republic of China, but they just couldn't get them in," Wittich said.
Previously, foreign companies wanting to bring Chinese nationals across had to apply through a complicated administrative system that could take up to six months to complete due to stringent background checks.
The new process, which took effect yesterday, has become a case-by-case process and could take as little as five days to approve three-year working visas for Chinese nationals, their spouses and children under the age of 18, according to the government.
Foreign multinationals will be able to apply for extensions of their Chinese employees' working visas for one year at a time for an unlimited period.
But Wittich complained that altering the entry policy to a case-by-case basis left the approval conditions unclear.
"We are not sure what the parameters and criteria are from the government side to approve these applications ... one of the first things that came up was what is the definition of a multinational company," he said.
Wittich said that in the meeting with MAC Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (
Richard Vuylsteke, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (AmCham), agreed, saying an unclear application process made room for unpredictability and favoritism.
"You want to have some degree of predictability on these things, which means the regulations are clearly transparent ... case by case tends to indicate a recast by way of guanxi," he said.
While praising the change as a step in the right direction, Vuylsteke said for the new policy to effectively facilitate Chinese nationals working in Taiwan a broader range of occupations needed to be included on the permitted list.
"The problem with the guidelines even now is they still seem skewed towards technical R&D and manufacturing ... they're not public relations or lawyers and other kinds of service industry and non-manufacturing types," he said.
Taiwan needs to include the service industry personnel as well as recent graduates to the selection process, said Vuylsteke, otherwise the government is serving only to undermine its goal of becoming a regional operations center.
"We're looking at Taiwan as one of the windows for operations in China. You've got to internationalize and bring in the biggest source of bilingual Chinese-English speakers in the world, which is from China," he added.
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