…without leaving the country. Thought some team members might want to know about this.
I’ve been studying at Taida for the last 9 months and will start official employment at a buxiban in Taipei next week once my classes finish. For the last 5 months or so I have been on a resident visa that I obtained as a result of my studies (jiu xue). I came into the country in March on a 2 month extendable, and changed over to the student RV in Taiwan around early July.
My employer started the wheels rolling on my work permit about 2 months ago - it took about 3-4 weeks to come through, which is about double the usual length of time. About 10 days after our submission of documents, the Council of Labor Affairs came back to me requesting a statement of why I wanted to change my status in Taiwan. I wrote a brief letter explaining (1) I was bored with studying Chinese, (2) I needed the money, and (3) I wanted to make a contribution to Taiwan… A couple of weeks later the work permit came through.
With my work permit in hand, about 2 weeks ago I made a couple of phone calls to MoFA asking them if it was possible to change my resident visa in Taiwan (student>>work). They said no, confirming what just about everyone else I’ve talked to about this has said, AND my own personal experience from about 8 years ago. I went down to MoFA and asked the attendant at the information desk. She said no as well. Not to be defeated, I filled in a visa application form and took it up to the service counter. Service desk attendent also said no, and informed me that I had to leave the country.
I then said, “But I rang the MoFA service hotline and they said you would consider my application if I could prove I’ve been a good student.” I had a copy of my chuxi zhengming (attendence record) and zaixue zhengming (proof of enrollment) with me and handed these over. She looked over these, and then said “We’ll need to see some grade sheets…” I went back to Taida and got the necessary paperwork. I took these along to MoFA the next day, and after explaining my case to a new attendent, they accepted my application. I got my work RV yesterday midday, and applied for my ARC late afternoon. Barring any major misshap, I should be legal by the end of the week.
The moral seems to be that yes, you can change your residency from student to work WITHOUT DOING A VISA RUN. The catch, however, is that they are trained to say no whenever they can to this. My grades for Taida were reasonable (around 85% for 2 semesters) and ditto for my attendence record, but this doesn’t seem to have been so important. The deciding factor seems to be that I argued the matter, in Chinese and with a few bits of paper to back-up my case. And they bought it. If you are facing a similar situation to the one I’ve described above, you might want to do the same thing.
Postscript to HG in Hong Kong - sorry mate, but the tour of girly bars in Kowloon is going to have to wait…