Citizenship & Residency Requirements in East and Southeast Asian Countries

[WilliamSmith]

I'm trying to get an overview of what countries in East and Southeast Asia have options for both full citizenship, and possibly also dual citizenship, and figure out their requirements.

I'll try to update this post for an overview each time I get some new information (assuming I'm allowed to go back and keep editing), and post the rest in the thread.

Anyone have any opinions on this? Have any of you become citizens? Permanent residents?

For the Asian nations, I have my personal preferences, but I think almost all these are wonderful countries that have the brightest futures by a long shot.
(The Caribbean is another interesting possibility for citizenship, and they have some citizenship by investment programs for those of you with the $$$ to drop a couple hundred thousand. Another thread on that might be good.)

My view is that US citizenship is a toxic liability to get rid of as fast as possible after you make your escape. (Not sure about Western Europe, which is a place to get out of, but not necessarily as bad as the US to hang on to your citizenship as an expat?)

Also, for me this is looking past the current pandemic / World War 3 scenario (so obviously subject to change a lot, and there easily could be travel bans coming up, etc).

Full list of countries I am going to check out requirements for eventually:

Japan
Taiwan
South Korea
Vietnam
Thailand
Philippines
Malaysia
Laos
Indonesia

Hong Kong
Macau
China

I don't have personal plans to check these myself, but feel free to pitch in if you know about them:
Mongolia
Myanmar
Singapore

[MrMan]

Indonesia does not seem that favorable. Your passport can't get you into places as easily as a US passport (as far as I know.) If you want to get ID documents done, it takes a long time, and you have to pay a little money on the side if you want things done fast. Corruption might be a little less than before, but it is a big problem. They have these quasi-volunteer village head, street head, or whatever roles where they get tips/bribes for helping you process stuff. And they think to process a document they have to set up a procedure where just about every employee in the office looks at it and stamps it. It looks like they have way too many people in the offices sometimes. Their salaries are low, and they get money off of gifts-- however the gifts are categorized.

I heard second-hand that something like a director of public works or something along those lines who did not take bribes got a lot of money from gifts after the fact, too. Gift giving was part of the culture back when there were little kingdoms and regents.

An expat generally cannot own land with 'hak milik'-- owners rights. A lot of land with locals is basically a lease for 50 years or so that can be renewed. They have a category that is similar where foreigners can do the same. But you can get what they call 'air space' in real estates-- apartment. If you marry an Indonesia, she can own land if you sign documents to split your assets. But it is likely that no one will check unless there is a lawsuit. It could be an issue if she dies. 1960's, there was a law that a foreigner who inherited property had a year to sell it. That's probably still on the books.

They do have a retirement visa. One thing that is intrusive with the Indonesian government is that if you are a foreigners living as a resident, they want you to pay tax on US investments you had prior to living in Indonesia. I think they also may allow you to count losses and gains together on a per country basis for taxes. So I think if you make a million dollars on the stock market in Hong Kong, and loose a million dollars on the stock market in Japan, you can not deduct the Japan losses against the Hong Kong gains. You can deduct Japan losses against Japan gains.

I don't remember much about retirement visas. What I recall did not see that appealing.

Banks don't want to open you an account unless you have some kind of worker paperwork. I got one the last time I worked there and plan on keeping it open. My wife is a citizen, so we have a joint account. If you don't have an account, you have to carry way too many bills. The largest bill was worth about $7 or $8 when I went there. It's ridiculous. They need half a million and million rupiah bills. South Korea was similar when I was there. I've sold a car for cash right before I went to the airport, and they gave us the money from their first offer, not what we agreed upon, and we were in such a hurry to move, we did not have time to count it. If I remember right, they short-changed us us about 100 bucks or so. But at least we sold it before we moved away and got on the plane.

On the other hand, if you want to live in Indonesia, you can make it work. I hear ex-CIA people live there. If you have cash, you can hire private security, ex military or maybe even current military. I went to a billionaire's house and he had military at a post out front. I saw the end of a movie once where this guy was on the run, trying to get to Jakarta. He got off the plane, and it was like when he was there, he was safe. They should have showed the freelance skycaps trying to help but running different directions with his luggage when he got there.

Since I have lived there, if I were going to live in another country, I might go there. There is some pretty tropical territory there, outside of the ugly city areas. Bali beaches are beautiful. The people are nice. There is economic opportunity if you are in the right niches and know what you are doing. Foreigners tend to be considered high status by lower economic class women, but I get the feeling that this is going down over time. The white overlords stopped ruling around the mid 20th century. Still, it seems to be a factor and looking foreign gets you some attention. I don't think being African helps. Some of scammers from Nigeria and other parts of Africa have ruined their reputation, even though there are African traders in Jakarta just doing business and exporting back to their home countries. But there are Africans there who've dated or married locals.

It's probably decreasing, but it still seems to be fairly common for single girls to be virgins. Again, with girls working in the cities, this is probably less, but there is a cultural expectation for a woman to be able to cook, clean, be a mother, and work around the home. Even if she works in an office, this is the norm.

[WilliamSmith]

Here are the things I've found out about citizenship in some of these so far. (I am looking at citizenship options first. Residency is often a lot easier, even if citizenship is tough.)
This is just from my first pass through all this research, so some of it could be wrong (or change with time), so I'll update it if I find out anything different or hear from anyone else on this:

Japan:
This is probably the most open East Asian country for obtaining full citizenship that I know of.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship, but you can become a permanent resident and then apply for naturalization to become a full citizen.
Edit: You need to have been living in Japan for five years or more, be financially self-sufficient, and not have been involved in subversive activities, among other things. But it's definitely very doable.
Also, some requirements may be relaxed if you are married to a Japanese spouse. (That's often true of many of the other countries too.)
The ministry of justice has a full list of requirements, and there's a couple of sites with detailed information on the requirements.
Japan also has a really strong passport for traveling to other countries.

Vietnam:
No dual citizenship allowed, but looks like it is possible to apply for citizenship if you've had a permanent resident status for five years, can speak Vietnamese, and pass a lot of scrutiny.
(I love Vietnam as an awesome country, but not sure about becoming a citizen there, even though they could count on me not to make trouble there. )

Cambodia:
This is one of the few Asian countries that I've heard of that allows dual citizenship, and also have a citizenship by investment program right now.
You can apparently also nationalize if you've been a resident for at least 7 years and are fluent in Khmer and take an exam, as well as other types of scrutiny.
Right now I think the citizenship by investment program costs something like $312,000-ish.
It is a really interesting up and coming country, whether you go for citizenship or not.

Taiwan:
I saw conflicting accounts of dual citizenship (one place said not allowed, one said there's no law against it), but apparently if you lived there for 5+ years and can speak Mandarin it is possible to get citizenship there.

South Korea:
Apparently citizenship is possible after living there for 5+ years and speaking Korean. No dual citizenship allowed.
I have not looked into this much because of already being committed to learning Japanese (and secondarily written Chinese) languages, but it looks like a really nice country.

Thailand:
LOL, looks like it is possible to get citizenship in this awesome country (no dual nationality), but this is the only one I saw that requires you to be able to sing the national anthem, as well as a lot of other requirements. Have to have been a permanent resident for 5+ years, speak Thai, be checked out quite a bit for suitability (including scrutinizing your appearance and demeanor, according to one page I read).

Malaysia:
I guess you can apply for citizenship if you have resided there for more than 10 of the past 12 years as a resident, and are fluent in Malay.
No dual citizenship allowed.
Also, their former PM Mahathir Mohamad was awesome and banned Israeli bloodsuckers from entering the country, LOL.

Philippines:
I've heard it's easy to get residency, but hard to get full citizenship. The page I saw said you need to have lived there for a continuous 10 year period before applying, and then have a lot of other criteria.
(Though English was one of the langauges you could be fluent in to qualify, as well as Spanish.)
However, if you did get it, then apparently you can get a 2nd passport without losing your Filipino one?

Singapore:
This one isn't on my list but I've heard it's still possible, but now quite difficult, and they're very selective about who they grant citizenship to these days.

Hong Kong and Macau as SARs of China also obviously got complicated in these times because of the freedom movement that also got subverted to some extent by Soros, and then the huge crackdowns from Xi and so on.

Will add to the list soon, but right now not sure:

Laos: I didn't find much about it, but possibly there is a provision for it if you've lived there for over 10 years (and I saw one saying maybe only 5 years if you're very qualified).

Indonesia: No dual citizenship allowed, not sure about residency or citizenship yet. (There are a lot of good things about it and I don't mean to be rude, but it's not my top choice because things got very ugly back in the day multiple times when the "POC" there started massacring the Chinese, who I guess outperformed them economically so much that they went berserk. I've already seen enough of this kind of thing in the jewnited states. Would far rather be in beautiful Indonesia than here anyway though. )

[WilliamSmith]

@MrMan
Thanks a lot for the detailed information on Indonesia! (You beat me to it when I was messing around with editing my draft of my 2nd post, LOL.) That was very interesting.

[Yohan]

Japan:
This is probably the most open East Asian country for obtaining full citizenship that I know of.
Japan does not allow dual citizenship, but you can become a permanent resident and then apply for naturalization to become a full citizen.
The ministry of justice has a full list of requirements, and there's a couple of sites with detailed information on the requirements.
Japan also has a really strong passport for traveling to other countries.

Other passports/citizenships are as strong as the Japanese one - my own one (Austria EU) is a very good nationality too and passport is fine in almost every country worldwide.

It is not so easy to qualify in Japan for permanent residence status - which is almost the same as citizenship, except voting rights, buying some certain landplots, like forests, rivers, rice fields. Permanent residence status can be removed in case of crimes/spending more than one year in prison.

Permanent resident status requires a foreigner to stay in Japan for many years holding other visa permits, like working visa, marriage to a Japanese national, 3-year long stay permit renewed several times etc. and many other documents are asked by immigration regarding your way of life in Japan, about your job, social life, health, education, language skills, housing etc. - You are expected to apply in person, and interviews are taken by rather mistrusting elderly experienced officers in Japanese language only.

I had no problem about permanent residence status, I made my exam for my technical job and my Japanese language certificate in Japan, my children were in Japanese school, I am married to a Japanese national, had always a regular job, some savings in Japan etc.

Japanese residence status does not cost you much money, just some stamp fee, but immigration officers want exactly to know how you plan your own future in Japan, I never had any intention to move back to Europe. I have to report to immigration only one time in 7 years to renew my ID-card as permanent resident and to renew my registration stamp in my passport to be permitted to leave and re-enter Japan any time, allowed to stay out of Japan up to 2 years. A permanent resident in Japan can buy his own land/house, do any general job/business, no working permit required.

Dual citizenship is not allowed, same with my own country (Austria, EU) - in most cases I know personally, applicants for long stay are fully satisfied with the permanent resident status and have no intention to renounce their own citizenship in future in exchange for the Japanese one. Why should you?

You need some personal special circumstances if you apply for Japanese citizenship. I know only about a few cases, like a man from former Yugoslavia who was living in Japan doing an import/export business for more than 20 years. After his own country was falling apart, he applied for Japanese nationality, another one is a Chinese from Taiwan, orphan, who was living in Japan since he was a small child, he speaks better Japanese than Chinese, a Korean who was born in Japan...

My two daughters had to made a choice as adults, either EU or Japan, they continue to live in Japan, native Japanese speakers, living with Japanese spouse and decided for Japanese citizenship...

There are maybe around 1 million people who are permanent resident holder (or special resident holder) in Japan, most of them are Chinese, Koreans, children from Brazil Japanese who prefer to live in Japan.

People like I myself from Europe are very few and all I know have Japanese families.

[WilliamSmith]

Thanks @Yohan
Great information there!

Permanent resident status requires a foreigner to stay in Japan for many years holding other visa permits, like working visa, marriage to a Japanese national, 3-year long stay permit renewed several times etc. and many other documents are asked by immigration regarding your way of life in Japan, about your job, social life, health, education, language skills, housing etc. - You are expected to apply in person, and interviews are taken by rather mistrusting elderly experienced officers in Japanese language only.

That's right, though from the various cases I've heard from people who did this, they're not always "mistrusting elderly experienced officers," but sometimes fairly friendly experienced officers, even though the interviews are all conducted in Japanese as you said.
Also, there's a chance of a home search as well, LOL.
This is something I personally am only considering doing if I marry a Japanese woman, but there is a chance of that happening (even if we don't decide to live there).

Dual citizenship is not allowed, same with my own country (Austria, EU) - in most cases I know personally, applicants for long stay are fully satisfied with the permanent resident status and have no intention to renounce their own citizenship in future in exchange for the Japanese one. Why should you?

Re: why I should renounce my US citizenship in general (regardless of whether I looked at Japanese citizenship or not), these posts I made earlier cover the basics:
viewtopic.php?p=367120#p367120

There is zero advantage to having the toxic liability of US citizenship, and it's only going to get worse from here.
Many people renounce it because of the increasingly onerous tax problems and double taxation issues unique to the US, along with the fact there are no benefits to being a US citizen, but to me that's comparatively trivial:
The US has been taken over by jews who are aggressively turning into a total bolshevik country that will eventually be impossible to get out of, like the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, and other countries that went communist. Besides that's it's a cesspit with nowhere to go but down, it's gone from being free to renounce citizenship, to costing first hundreds, now thousands of dollars, and then as we can obviously see from the pandemic and NWO schemes for vaccine passports, it's only a matter of time before they have an even more extreme penalty or outright prohibition toward escaping the country at all.