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Being a Chinese national resident on the Mainland makes it difficult to relocate to Hong Kong…

QUESTION

I’m a British and Australian citizen (dual nationality) living in Australia and I have a mainland Chinese girlfriend, presently living in China.

We wish to move to Hong Kong to live together and I want to start a technology business there.

I have about $300K HKD cash available and my Chinese girlfriend has probably four times that available too.

We both have investment assets that could be accessed fairly readily which are larger than the cash levels we have available.

My goal is that once I get the business legally registered and start operating, to generate enough revenue to then get into the Hong Kong science park and establish proper offices, start hiring, and grow the business etc.

How do we go about doing this in the best way possible?

ANSWER

On the face of it, this question would appear to beg a relatively straightforward answer. Unfortunately, because your girlfriend is presently a PRC national who’s resident on the mainland, the opportunities for her to relocate to Hong Kong are quite limited in so much as there will have to be a certain amount of, in a sense, fancy footwork for both of you to be able to achieve your ultimate objective, which is for you to be both working and invested in your own enterprise, and clearly carrying on the lives that you wish to carry on together after your relocation to Hong Kong.

So what I propose to do is to break this answer down into the opportunity for you and then the opportunity for your girlfriend, and then try and tie it all together with a series of options that might make sense for you in all the circumstances.

But, just to be clear from the very get go, the idea of her being able to simply relocate to Hong Kong and join in the business that you’re planning to establish as you relocate yourself from Australia is not going to happen. It’s going to have to be done in a roundabout way.

So here we go. Effectively, from the information that you supplied to me, it would appear that you have all the necessary resources to successfully complete an application for a business investment visa. Now, I don’t propose to labour the requirements for approval under the business investment visa because appended to the end of this post is another piece of content that exists on our website that talks in quite some considerable detail about the requirements to pass the approvability test for a business investment visa.

But I’ll just take it as given that you’re in a position to do that, so then we can move on to the situation as regards your girlfriend. So here the options for you are:

Firstly, you can essentially if you’re in a loving committed life partner relationship, you can get married. And then after you have secured your own business investment visa for Hong Kong, you can sponsor her for a dependent visa and she’ll be able to move from China to live with you in Hong Kong. And at the point of activating that dependent visa, she will be lawfully employable and she’ll be able to join you in your new enterprise. So, that’s available to you if I say you’re in a loving, committed life partner relationship and you’re not just doing it for immigration purposes.

The second option is for her to apply under the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme if she is a person of exceptional talent, both academic and professional. I haven’t seen her CV so I don’t know much or if indeed anything about her background and for all practical purposes, whether, you know, she’s a candidate for this programme. But, the Quality Migrant Admission  Scheme (QMAS) is an option for her even though only 23% of all applications in the QMAS get approved, 77% of those approvals do go to mainland Chinese nationals who are resident on the mainland.

So, that’s an option if she’s got a sterling CV. Be aware though, it’s a hell of a black box. You’re not going to know what her chances of approval are until the selection committee announced the results. It’s really very, very opaque. You’ve got no ability to really understand what’s going on in that deliberation process and it’s going to take between twelve and 15 months for that process to play itself out.

So you’re still going to have quite a weight ahead of you. Even if such an application does go on to represent approval for her, she could then, on the other hand, apply for a student visa in Hong Kong and undertake a course of study at a recognised tertiary education institute, either at Bachelor level or at any Master’s level if she’s already completed a bachelor’s degree in China. Now the advantage of this is that effectively she would be able to move to Hong Kong almost straight away. She would complete her course of study and for the purposes of this example I’ll suggest that it’s a master’s degree.

But she’ll complete her master’s degree in one year and at the end of that year she will be able to secure a one year in a sense unlimited working visa under the Immigration Arrangements for Non-Local Graduates (IANG). And that would mean that she’d then be in a position to immediately join your firm, working for the company that you’ve established in the meantime and assuming that uh during the currency of what would have then been two years since you started the business, she got a student visa and then worked for you for one year under IANG, your business has then gone on to become uh, solidly entrenched commercial enterprise such that it can be deemed a suitable and credible sponsor.

At the end of her one year free working visa privileges under IANG, you will then be able to use your company to secure an employment visa extension for her. And assuming that your business stays in business all throughout the preceding five or six years, she’ll be able to be sponsored by that business all the way through to seven years when she’ll be able to adjust their status to permanent residency and effectively your problem goes away. So, those are the rational opportunities for her to join you in Hong Kong in a sense directly.

Another way that you might wish to consider would be to put on hold for at least twelve months your plans to relocate to Hong Kong, and then secure immigration permissions for her to be temporarily resident in Australia with you under some visa class that’s suitable in the constructs of her life and her plans for Australia while you wait out the one year period that’s required whereby; under the General Employment Policy of Hong Kong, a chinese national who has held a residence visa in a country outside of China and has lived there for a minimum period of twelve months will be able to make an application for immigration status in Hong Kong as though she were just a regular foreign national. So in that respect as though she were, as she is in your instance, an Australian or a British national. But this application must be made from outside of Hong Kong and you could then effectively make an application for both of you to secure business investment visas both of you investing into your proposed business in Hong Kong and assuming that you can pass the approvability test as I’ve detailed a little bit earlier in the answer, then you might both of you be able to secure permissions to join in that business in Hong Kong in your own right and then come to Hong Kong together and implement your business plan. But that would require, as I say, her moving from China to Australia first to be with you and to be in Australia for at least twelve months before the application for a business investment visa is made in her name.

And she would have to be outside of Hong Kong all the while that that application was being considered by the Immigration Bepartment, which as you can see from the post that I’ve included as regards the approbability test, can mean at least six months waiting time.

So no easy answers for you. There are certain pathways for you to achieve your outcome, but it’s not going to happen overnight and you may find that you’re going to have to perhaps tread a journey through to your joint lives together in Hong Kong that’s going to be a little bit around the houses before you are able to achieve what you wish to achieve. Okay, I hope you found that useful.

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The Business Investment Visa Approvability Test (Referenced In The Podcast Answer)

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