Hi. I’m sure this has been talked about many times, but I couldn’t locate the answer.
We are expecting our first child soon. I’m an american and my wife is Taiwanese. I know how to register our baby with AIT.
What do we need to do to get Taiwan citizenship and a Passport for our child.
Thanks.
easily done, in fact i was shocked when we did it for our second born, after getting her us passport, i waltz into the police station a week before we’re due to head back home for vacation, expecting to get an arc and visa. no sorry, they told me, the law has changed, you have to get a taiwan passport for her. after a mildly disgusting display on my part i i began gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair, figuring–my vacation is destroyed.
luckily the taiwan bureaucracy is not as bad as i expected. you need only head to the household registration office with the babies birth certificate, and have their name entered on your wife’s hukoumingbu. armed i believe with a hujitengben, and two photos, you go to the passport building, all can be done within a few days.
Why do you want to do something as dumb as getting a taiwanese passport for your child.
Certain international schools will not accept a kid unless they can show they entered on a foreign passport.
If you are a foreigner, you can homeschool your child. Homeschooling is illegal if you are a Taiwan national, except in Taipei.
If you are local, your kid must go to school where the Hukou is, if foreign, wherever you want. My kid’s school books arrived in Taipei, where my wife keeps here household registration, not in Taichung where we live.
Names: when we entered Taiwan, the MOF would not allow them to use my wife’s name for her children’s last name. Instead, they used my bullshit Chinese last name. My kids are now “MAI” instead of “SHIH” like they were for the first six years of their lives.
What will you do if China takes over and refuses to permit foreign passport holders to take kids with local IDs out?
All in all, you are better off keeping him a foreigner. Treatment is better, life is more secure, flexibility is greater.
Vorkosigan
what the police were telling me at the time was that she HAD to get her taiwan passport in order to leave taiwan. if my understanding of the law is incorrect i hope someone will post it!
That’s not the worst part of this story. If you look on your son’s Chinese birth certificate you will see that your name is absent because you are a foreigner. The way it was told to me at Tai Da hospital in 1999, when my son was born, if we chose to get our son a Taiwan passport he cannot legally have a foreign father. I am assuming that with the change in the law parents no longer have the option and all children must have a Taiwan passport if born in Taiwan.
It