Okay, here’s the update:
I finally was offered guarantor-less mortgages by two banks: SinoPac (Hankou St. Branch) and ChinaTrust (Banchiao branch). SinoPac was only willing to lend me 50 percent of the purchase price of the apartment, so I ended up going with ChinaTrust (which has agreed to lend me 70 percent of the purchase price – the amount I asked for, and perhaps would have lent more if I wanted it).
Sinopac conditioned their loan offer on my buying some life insurance through them (payable to a beneficiary of my choice, but with the stipulation that any insurance payment would go first toward paying off the balance of the mortgage) – a reasonable condition.
ChinaTrust also asked me if I would be willing to buy casualty/life insurance, but they only brought this up after approving the loan, so it wasn’t really a condition. I ended up buying casualty insurance from them (just NT$1 million coverage for a year) for a single one-time premium payment of NT$3,500. They deducted this amount from the mortgage processing fee, so actually I didn’t have to pay anything extra for it. Basically it seems they just are hoping to get you started as an insurance customer with them, as well as covering a bit of their potential risk on the mortgage).
If anyone needs a lead on a mortgage officer, p.m. me and I can provide the names of the contacts at SinoPac and/or ChinaTrust. I should probably mention that I did the entire application process (preliminary discussions and all the paperwork) in Chinese, so I don’t have any idea whether the mortgage staff at either of these banks can speak English. The guy at ChinaTrust said I was his first foreign mortgage customer, so there were a number of points that he had to figure out from scratch, such as what ID number to use for me (APRC? Passport?) and how to enter it into the system. They don’t seem to have any existing English-language information or forms for mortgage lending procedures at these banks, so someone who is not comfortable applying in Chinese might want to try an international bank such as HSBC first (I didn’t apply to them, so don’t know what the actual chances are there, though others in previous threads have said they may be better than some other banks).
Hope this is helpful to someone.