More on Visas...

Yesterday in the comment's section to the post on visas, a commenter named Peter left a link to an article written by Meg of the Violent Eclipse blog. Meg was an occasional commenter on this blog and at times we commiserated about being bloggers in China using blogspot. Her blog showed an interesting insight and outlook on China and I enjoyed reading her entries. Having not paid a lot of attention to chinalyst as of late, I was unaware of her situation and it was disheartening to hear about it.

I'm one of the Chinese faces at this blog and before I wrote yesterday's posts, I talked it over with some of the other contributors. We all agreed that we were sick of hearing about visa complaints from people. When I was an undergraduate, I had the chance to intern at the Foreign Ministry and at that time, I met a lot of people who ended up in embassies and consulates around the world. A number of my classmates accepted positions with the Foreign Ministry as well and while I considered it, in the end I decided to attend a prestigious Masters program in the US.

From my classmates and former coworkers, I've yet to hear anything about tourist visas being down. In fact, more people have been granted tourist visas than usual (perhaps based on the fact too many people are getting tourist visas instead of the proper visas).

The visa issue is a problem, but its something that's needed to be cleaned up. For every unfortunate case like Meg's, there are 10 cases of lazy slackers or psuedo "teachers" at "schools" who've been around for a long time and do nothing. For every legitimate businessman who is complaining about not being able to get an F visa, there are 10 who should have gotten Z visas long ago and who just didn't want to go through with the hassle of it all.

China's visa situation has been a problem and required cleaning up, the Olympics served as a great motivator to go about cleaning things up. It's just extremely unfortunate that the process has impacted innocent individuals as well as the slackers and the sketchy business types.