Business Registration and Visa

This is my husband holding our not-so-easy to attain business license! We've been moving toward this goal generally since late 2012 and fervently since March. The process (thus far) has taken us 7 months, piles of paperwork, and at least 30 trips to various government offices. 

Our business name is Caide Consulting (pronounced tz-eye  duh) which is one of the transliterations of our last name but means virtue and talent in Chinese. It's also how the Bible translates "noble" as in Proverbs 31 or other passages that mention a noble wife. 

We first had to rent office space and take care of registering with the appropriate city district. From there, we had to submit stacks of documents and get approval from the Industry and Commerce Department and the Commercial Affairs Bureau. Sometimes the documents we submitted needed small changes. We'd have to re-print the documents with the corrections and make another trip. The craziest part of the process was having to authenticate our passports........twice! This required taking our passports to the US Embassy to be copied, notarized and attested that they are true and real US passports that belong to us, then having the copies sent to an agent in the US to take them on our behalf to the US Secretary of State to sign, then taken by the agent to the Chinese Consulate in the US to be stamped and signed. Each step had a fee, plus postage, plus the agency fee, each time costing about 500 USD each time. Other than those fees and the investment, the registration fees were low, less than 150 USD total.

After those 20+ steps we were given the license above in September and can begin operation, but still had to finish moving the investment capital to China, setting up a bank account, registering with the taxi bureau, and changing our visas to an employment visa. 

We were in a hurry to change our visas because 1) once we change to the employment visas, we don't have to exit the country every 90 or 120 days and 2)because she was born here, Abigail wasn't given an actual visa, but a document that allowed her to stay until the time of our next exit, which is Nov 3. 

The stack of papers we had to submit to the employment bureau was about the thickness of half a ream of paper. We submitted them last week but were told the processing time would be 10 days and there are still a few steps after the employment bureau. So, we wrote a nice, gushy letter similar to this one asking if they could please please pretty please process it quickly. We got it in 3 days! 

Our next hold up came because both the girl we've hired to help us with the registration and our office manager are related to one another and they both had to leave town to attend a wedding so we will start our last step at the Foreign Affairs office this week without them and hope we can handle it ourselves until they return later in the week. 

All of us have to exit China before November 3, but Abigail has to apply for a new visa before she can re-enter. (The rest of us are valid until next February). We had planned for all of us to go to Hong Kong but then we found out Abigail's first visa has to be applied for in her home country. Now our plan is that I (Jill) will take Abigail to the US and get my work visa and Abigail's visa. James will take the girls across the border to our north and then get his work visa at a later time. (The border town isn't able to process visas). It's not worth the expense of all of us going to Hong Kong if we can't do all that we need to do there.