Retirement drive
A team from the Philippines Leisure and Retirement Authority was in town last week on the last leg of a four-city tour to get well-heeled mainlanders to retire to the Philippines.
Mainland retirees need to invest just US$50,000, the cost of an apartment in Guangzhou, to get an IR2 visa, which gives them multiple entry rights and allows them to stay indefinitely in the Philippines.
Some 3,000 mainlanders are already among the 9,100 foreigners who have retired to the Philippines since the early 1990s, despite little or no promotion of the programme to date. The roadshow, the first by the authority, is expected to draw 5,000 more Chinese retirees over the next few years.
While money is not a problem, security is a concern for Chinese considering retiring or investing overseas. But the authority's chief, Francisco Lirio, has promised that he would personally see to it that the mayors and police chiefs in places where mainlanders choose to settle ensure they are well protected.
'The mayors and police chiefs will make regular reports to us on the security of their charges,' Mr Lirio said.
Malaysia, too, is making a pitch for rich Chinese, but in a rather low-key manner, possibly because of racial sensitivities in its multi-racial society.
Its programme grants retirees permanent residency and allows children to study in Malaysian schools if the retirees keep about US$40,000 in fixed deposits in Malaysia and have a monthly income of at least US$2,000. China is the only country where the Malaysian ambassador has authority to approve applications for the Malaysia Second Home programme.
Shi Dongxiong, the outbound manager of China International Travel Service's Guangzhou branch, sees potential in such programmes, as they are affordable to many people. 'It's a matter of whether they are interested or not,' he said. 'I believe they would be interested if they can get residency status. Stability is a different matter. Every country has stability problems.'
But while the entry fee is chicken feed to entrepreneurs, such people are not abandoning in droves a province that is experiencing double-digit growth.
Kelly Zhong, a businesswoman, and her husband successfully applied to go to Canada three years ago but gave up the move because of the language barrier and a perceived lack of investment opportunities.
Southeast Asian countries offer different challenges, though. They are cheap, but it is hard for them to project a superior lifestyle.
A survey by Datamonitor last year found that wealth growth in China was the fastest among Asian countries. The number of people with an annual income of more than US$50,000 has risen at an annual rate of 14.9 per cent between 1997 and 2001.
