CEEM July 1, 2013

Chinese are Tourists rather than Terrorists

Xu Qiyuan 

If you have a Chinese passport, congratulations. Why? Because holding a Chinese passport, it turns out, gives you direct access to the school of moral excellence that is the UK’s visa application process. Unfortunately, for a person like me, this opportunity is more of a curse than a blessing. I have little time to devote to it, and even less interest in having my powers of patience expanded by the British Embassy.

Several months ago, I received an invitation from a think tank in London, the CSFI, to attend a conference. I would have been glad to accept. The topic was interesting and it is exciting to visit the UK. I enjoy travelling in Europe generally—that is one of the reasons why I am a visiting researcher in Brussels.
 
To travel to the UK from Brussels as a Chinese citizen, I need a visa. I already have one for the Schengen area, but my application for entry to the UK, nonetheless, starts with 138 online questions. Thankfully, these questions are not all about me. Forty-eight of them want information about my parents, my wife, my child and the two friends I intend to visit. If I had been reckless enough to plan more than two visits, there would be another 7 questions for each additional one. I also find myself reluctantly grateful for China’s one-child policy, because there would have been an additional 8 questions for each dependent child.
 
Interestingly, there are 25 questions about the applicant’s employment, income, expenditure and financial status. That doesn’t really strike me as appropriate for tourists, but maybe the authorities do not expect many people to actually go on holiday to the UK. At any rate, the applicant is required to show their willingness to avoid being a drain on the UK economy up-front. Submitting the visa application that the embassy might, or might not, approve costs €100.
 
Patiently, I fill out the questions and pay my €100. It seems to me, at this point, that my role in the process is complete. Ah, I was naive. A new web page informs me that I should submit a pile of supporting documents including my marriage certificate and details of my current employment. The latter requires a letter from my employer, with details of my salary, the length of employment, and pay slips or tax returns. It is not possible to do this online. I have to go to Paris to submit the documents and allow the authorities to make a record of my fingerprints, or I will be charged an additional €124 euros to do so in Brussels. This is when I start to wonder whether it is me, or the procedure, that is crazy.
 
As I left my family behind in Beijing, while I work in Brussels as a visiting economic researcher, I do not have documents like my marriage certificate to hand. It is also extremely difficult for me to get formal evidence of employment in Beijing. All the hurdles are starting to make me angry. So, I decide to give up and say ‘sorry, no’ to the invitation.
 
Perhaps my case was a one-off? Not so. Many of my friends and colleagues have had the same difficulties. Yu Jianrong, a professor in Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was invited by the LSE for a meeting in London, was provoked to find that he needed to submit not only his identity card and passport, but also the household registration book that is called “hukou” in China. He has been to many OECD countries but had never been asked for this. Furthermore, the visa agent advised him to pay a little more to avoid submitting the hukou. Yu wrote about this on weibo, the Chinese Twitter. It trended last January, stoking hot discussions, and it does raise questions about the UK’s visa policy.
 
According to a report from China’s National Radio, of Oct. 6th last year, Paris attracts more than one million tourists from China, while London draws less than one-tenth of that number. On that basis, London’s tourist industry is missing out. Of course, every country – rightfully – worries about its security. But Chinese tourists are generally more interested in buying William and Kate souvenirs than they are in planting bombs. In fact, they spend so much, in cash, that they are a target for pickpockets.
 
Think about type I and II errors in statistics. A type 1 error is a false positive, in this case the conclusion that the average Chinese tourist is a terrorist. A type II error is a false negative, when a real risk is not detected. We always make tradeoffs between these two, but perhaps the British visa authorities should focus a little more on probability.  

Xu Qiyuan
Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences