East China's Anhui Province has said it will issue permanent residence permits to foreign talents, or Chinese "green card," to support the National Science Center being built in its capital city Hefei.
High-level talents from abroad, their spouses and underage children, as well as overseas Chinese with foreign passports and PhD degrees, who are working in the province will be able to apply for permanent residence directly, Xiao Chaoying, vice minister of CPC Anhui Provincial Committee Organization Department, said during a news conference on Monday, chinanews.com reported.
"Chinese with foreign passports who have been working in Anhui for four years and living in China for more than six months each year will be able to apply as well," Xiao added.
The new policy is a part of Anhui's efforts to attract talents to work at the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center." The construction of the center was approved in January and will be finished in 2020, making it the second national science center after the one in Shanghai.
"The project is in urgent need of elite professionals with skills in the information technology, energy, healthcare and environmental sectors," Xiao said.
Anhui's new immigration policy will be applied throughout the province, while other provinces' "green card" programs are limited to free trade zones or innovation demonstration zones, Zhao Huaiyin, deputy director of the Anhui Provincial Public Security Department, said on Sunday.
Zhao said foreign students who graduate from Chinese universities and would like to start a company in Anhui will be able to apply for a special visa of up to five years to stay in China.
The Anhui government will also hold one or two recruitment fairs for overseas talents annually in the future, chinanews.com reported.
"In our schools, more than half of the graduate students and PhD students are from foreign countries, with most from the developing countries, and many of them would like to stay in China after graduation," Chu Jianxun, vice president of the School of Public Affairs under Hefei's University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), told the Global Times on Tuesday.
"Knowing they have the option to stay, live and work in China after graduation may incentivize foreign students to make more durable connections and better friendship with their local peers," Matt Christenson, a US PhD applicant at USTC, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Chu said that even though Anhui is not the most developed province in the prosperous Yangtze River Delta region, it develops rapidly with great potential. "Anhui has international vision, as it has many overseas companies as well as the National Science Center," Chu said.
China has made progress in easing its residence and entry policies for foreigners since September 2015, which helped attract more talents from overseas, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The country issued a total of 1,576 permanent residence certificates to foreigners in 2016, an increase of 163 percent over the previous year, according to Xinhua.
