I don’t think only paying the minimum should effect your credit score. But this is Taiwan. I think they meant missing a payment.
The links are up in this thread, but basically you just need a citizen digital certificate
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What is this? Do I need to go to the house hold register for this?
If you are citizen yes, A(P)RC holders need to apply at NIA. Not a difficult process, but has to be done in person… Just go there, take a ticket and wait, ask to apply for the alien digital certificate. Once received you need also to buy a smart card reader (00s tech jeez…) And set it up on the computer.
Once all these steps are done, you will be able to access the credit report/score function and see it the first one for free. All in Chinese, no English version is available online.
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Unfortunately paying not in full a card balance severely affects your credit score, it will take some time to recover, and you must now always pay in full and on time.
It happened to me once in HK, couldn’t pay in full a balance (it was very big, like 12 or 14k HKD) paid 10k before deadline, then the remainder after a few days since I got a cheque in, still affected the score.
Always paid in full ever since.
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This is handy to know
Why does this not surprise me? 
Credit score goes down and the bank gets interest on your unpaid balance? Banks really are king.
Or the old fashioned way, I printed the credit check form out online, put a copy of ID inside, sent the form to Taipei and they mail you a hardcopy, free for the first one. If it’s the second in a year I put a $100 bill in the envelope
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It doesn’t make sense. If you pay less than the minimum I could understand. It paying the minimum should not effect your credit score.
if you don’t pay the minimum you are screwed, the score is trashed basically. Credit score in Taiwan is super conservative, they want credit cards to operate like “deferred” debit cards, they don’t like risk (I can agree with them on not liking risks, but this is exaggerated).
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To set up the card reader was a mess, so many stupid drivers from windows XP era to install to make it work, and if you use Mac it seems almost impossible. Works (kinda) on Windows, but you also need to change some stupid language and region settings to make it work properly. It’s all so finicky.
Once you set that you can even set up the FIDO app on your smartphone which at this day I have never used and it seems it has no use at all, not even with gov services. A complete waste and a complication of a process which can be so much simpler. Real TW fashion (they kept this from JP, they make so much fuss about seemingly easy things).
Maybe it depends on your windows version? I bought a card reader in 7/11 and it worked seamlessly with my pc (windows 10)
I agree. But it seems “this is Taiwan” 
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I bought mine at Guang Hua, I have windows 11 laptop bought in HK set on Italian language. Had to make many changes before making it work. And all error messages are either in Chinese or the not supported font tile, so it was quite frustrating to understand what was going on.
Anyways, it works now.
Always was 
Mine works on my Macbook but not my windows PC 
The alien Citizen certificate is also used to check your Taiwanese pension and using the card is the only way to check it as a foreigner.
I’m also confused about why paying the minimum balance would affect your credit score 
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At certain banks (e.g Post Bank, Land Bank) you can fill out a form and after a week or so check pension/labor insurance payments at the ATM.
There is a thread on it.
6% pension for foreign spouses, how do I make a pension account? - #15 by slawa
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Don’t ask me, ask the JCIC
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It’s not really a credit card if you need to pay the full balance at the end of each payment period. A credit card should be flexible. A balance should be able to be carried over at the end of the payment period. Otherwise the credit cards worth is almost the same as a debt card.
The only worth is if you are deploying the cash you would spend otherwise to invest somewhere short term. But the value maybe a few hundred dollars per month.
But “this is Taiwan”