Visa's Available

[JJ1988]

Hey, this is my first post on the forums and i'm just looking for some help.

I am married to a Chinese woman who lives in Beijing, we were married in the UK but she had personal problems and left to go back to China. In the UK if you have a foreign civil partner you can apply for the marriage visa so she has indefinate leave to remain in the country, so my question is: if i want to move to China, is there an equivalent of this visa type available for me?? we have been married for 15 months if thats important.

Thanks for any help.

[roddy]

I think all you can do is get a tourist visa in the UK, and then apply for more tourist visas. There is a D visa, but it doesn't seem easy to get hold of. Hopefully the fact that you're visiting your wife will mean you get longer tourist visas and have to mess around with extensions less often. It may, if you're going to be working or studying, end up being easier to just get the appropriate visa that way, but to be honest you won't know until you get there and see what the local PSB say.

Edit: Although you should probably wait for the foreign spouses to weigh in, they will know better.

[BrandeX]

As a spouse of a Chinese national, I can let you know as I have also done, all the Chinese gov. normally issues, is L tourist visas for being married to a citizen.

[AxelManbow]

I currently hold a 12 month L visa, issued around 2 months ago. It is what is colloquially called a marriage visa but can apply to anyone with close family in China.

It does not allow you to work and unlike X and Z visas it is not transferred into a residence permit within one month of arrival in China. It does allow continuous residence and multiple entry until expiry. It does not give permission to work but does allow study - useful at a time when smaller language schools (which I've come to prefer over universities) have great difficulty issuing study visas.

Quite straight-forward to apply for (I did this application within China at my local PSB, transferring from an X visa, no need to leave the country) - necessary documents were my wife's Hukou, my password, her ID and proof of marriage, plus numerous photocopies of the above. Having papers approved and paid the fee my passport was returned within 2 days with the visa stuck on one of the pages, and my old residence permit stamped expired.