新墨西哥人 Posted February 5, 2015 at 12:18 AM Report Posted February 5, 2015 at 12:18 AM Most likely (fingers crossed) my husband, daughter & I will be living in Shanghai for 6 months starting pretty soon (we're waiting on getting final permission for my husband to take leave from work.) My husband is going to be a visiting scientist at the 中国科学院上海。 A question for you all: I own my own online business and work from home. I sit around hammering away at my laptop, mostly writing code. I will still be working for my business in China, great firewall permitting. I'm not actually going to do business in China per se (no sales pitches, etc). Just do what I always do but in a different country. Question is, what do I tell people? Should I be cautious of the fact I am technically going to be working in China on a tourist visa? Or should I not really worry unless I'm talking to some government bureaucrat in which case I can just say I'm a housewife or taking a long vacation from work? Quote
abcdefg Posted February 5, 2015 at 01:34 AM Report Posted February 5, 2015 at 01:34 AM Question is, what do I tell people? For visa purposes, best to just say you are a wife and spouse, taking care of the house and children, maybe doing some travel. For general casual conversation, ditto. I will still be working for my business in China, great firewall permitting. It has become considerably more difficult to circumvent GFW restrictions in the last few weeks. It is conceivable that the authorities could ratchet up the blocks making them even tighter as time goes by. Or they could forget about them and relax somewhat. Hard for anyone to say. Need to at least take into consideration a worst case scenario in which continuing your computer-based work may not be possible. Or it might be possible, but with slower connection speeds that might impact productivity. Quote
liuzhou Posted February 5, 2015 at 07:58 AM Report Posted February 5, 2015 at 07:58 AM If your husband is going to be working in China presumably he will have a Z-visa for entry then a resident's permit. As an accompanying spouse, you will also be entitled to the same. However, as I understand it, you are still not technically supposed to be working, but for this kind work, no one will know unless you tell them. And so long as your income is not coming from China, no one will care. Quote
roddy Posted February 5, 2015 at 09:08 AM Report Posted February 5, 2015 at 09:08 AM Even the government bureaucrats won't care. Maybe do an audit of the resources you need and check if they'll be accessible from China (stuff you might not expect, like sourceforge, has been banned at times, and anything that offers any kind of free hosting or download service is vulnerable) and just before you leave sign up for a few month trials of different VPNs so you have different options. Quote
新墨西哥人 Posted February 5, 2015 at 03:08 PM Author Report Posted February 5, 2015 at 03:08 PM Fortunately my business can run without me, and even pay me some even if I'm not working. When I visited Shanghai before in 2010, I was able to set up my own VPN, but I'm not counting on that working this time around. However there may be advantages to this method vs using companies, but maybe not. I think I was able to access our servers hosted on Amazon's cloud without VPN, but again, I'm assuming this will be difficult this time around as well. I saw on some forums people had issues back in 2011 with only sporadically being able to access the cloud. I could also develop on my laptop (sans internet) but would have to periodically push my changes live. This is kind of what I do anyway, really, however the way I do things now I connect remotely to our database as well... I forget the visa my husband is applying for - for some reason he is not a standard work situation, probably because he's working for a government-run academic institute, and they will not be collecting (chinese) taxes on his income. For some reason everyone (visa co, and I believe the people at the institute) is recommending tourist visa for myself and daughter and not a tag-along visa (and requesting a long stay so we don't have to leave every 30 days) Quote
imron Posted February 6, 2015 at 03:12 AM Report Posted February 6, 2015 at 03:12 AM If you've got SSH access to a machine outside of China, you can probably just use that instead of a VPN. Quote
zhouhaochen Posted February 10, 2015 at 05:23 AM Report Posted February 10, 2015 at 05:23 AM Despite all the talk of VPNs not working in China anymore, my Astrill VPN works fine on my computer, just like it has been for years. On my mobile phone it is a bit troublesome sometimes, but I guess you would not use that for working. If you come on a Spouse or tourist visa, you are not supposed to work. While I do not think anyone would go to your home and check what you do on your computer, I would make sure to at least not write it on any official documents Quote
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