I have canadian citizenship and my one month visitors’ visa is close to expiring. I need another month extended even though my visa has a stamp saying “no extensions will be granted”. I was told that the police station will sometimes give you an extension depending on their mood and on the reason you give them for the requested extension. I also heard that an extension can be “bought” through certain Chinese language schools. What is my best approach considering I only have 6 days left on my visa?
In my impression, the options for going to H.K., Singapore, Bangkok, or wherever and obtaining a new short-term visa, and the ways of maintaining the validity of one’s visa status in Taiwan, have been discussed in this FORUM in many previous threads.
Indeed, the Legal Matters FORUM is now spread over six pages, hence I suggest that some browsing into all the previous postings here will probably throw some useful light on your situation.
I have never heard of anyone getting an extension if their visa is stamped “No extension will be granted”, for any reason whatsoever.
As for getting a resident visa from a Chinese language school, you’re right that at lots of schools, they’ll give you the visa as long as you pay the tuition, even though you don’t need to attend classes. But since you only have a few days left on your visa, there probably isn’t enough time to change your visitor visa to a resident visa now.
So I don’t see how you can avoid doing a “visa run”. Usually the cheapest place to go is Macau. The plane tickets to Macau are slightly cheaper than Hong Kong, and the hotels in Macau are
much cheaper than Hong Kong. And I heard that as of about six months ago, the de-facto Taiwan embassy in Macau can finally issue visas.
(Before, they couldn’t issue visas in Macau, so you had to take a one-hour boat ride to Hong Kong to get a visa for Taiwan. But that was still the cheapest way to do it because the hotels in Macau are so much cheaper than in Hong Kong.)