Huzzah for China’s K-Visa
Make China Tang again?
In response to US’s new $100k H-1B visa fees1, China announced a new visa program (the K-visa) which aims to attract STEM talent to China.
Things are quite early, and we will see how this program actually gets implemented2. But broadly I believe this is good news for two reasons:
Barriers to immigration are a large tax that we all bear. They hurt prospective migrants, sending companies, and receiving countries. In general we should welcome the creation of legal and sustainable channels for the movement of top talent.
Haven’t we in the west been hoping for the past 70 years that China will liberalize and open up? We should celebrate every step in that direction.
There are enormous challenges ahead for China if this is to lead to concrete impact. At the very least, Mandarin is hard to learn, and Chinese culture and institutions are not geared towards cosmopolitanism to the extent that, say, the US and UK are.
But the potential gains are great.
In the Tang dynasty China (~600-900), was cosmopolitan and rich. The capital city in Xi’an was the largest city in the world, home to merchants and scholars from Central Asia, Persia, India, and even the Mediterranean. Buddhism, Persian music, and foreign fashions arrived in China from the Silk Road and were enthusiastically embraced at court.
The result was a confident, outward-looking civilization that saw engagement with the wider world as a source of vitality, not threat.
If today’s K-visa is even the first tiny step in a decades-long march towards Tang-era openness, then I say huzzah.
Most obviously, Chinese netizens do not seem happy about new visa. In response to anti-Indian vitriol from Chinese, the the Chinese state media released a statement instructing people to kindly refrain from making “strange remarks” that could be seen as bigoted.