National Treatment to Foreigners in China

Social Insurance Law grants national treatment to foreigners who are employed in China.

HU Xiaoyi, vice minister of Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of the People’s Republic of China, has expressed recently that the relevant provisions of Article 97 of Social Insurance Law, which states that foreigners who are employed in China participate in social insurance, follow the international practice and also grant national treatment to increasing number of foreigners who are employed in China.

HU Xiaoyi expressed that in a press conference of General Office of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. He said, first of all, those provisions in Article 97 of Social Insurance Law about the foreigners who are employed in China just belong to a common international principle or practice and in may countries, laws of social security and social insurance have similar provisions. Second, economy and society in China is increasingly open now and more and more foreigners are employed in China. Thus social insurance law and relevant administrative regulations do not and should not exclude them. If they exclude foreigners, for any enterprise or unit, they are factually unequal provisions which offer unequal treatment and rules to working staff within the enterprise or unit. Therefore, there should be a fair treatment in the national law, or in another word, grant national treatment.

As for the bilateral relations for solving problems, HU said, in international practice, each country has right to formulate provisions for its own social insurance affairs. When bilateral relations get involved, bilateral agreements can be used to deal with corresponding issues.

For example, there is such a bilateral agreement between China and Germany to avoid working staff’s repetitive participation of social insurance and payment in both native country and employment country. After signing the agreement, during these years, the overall situation for its implementation is good. Now since there is such an explicit provision in Social Insurance Law, it will be more convenient for China to follow that German precedent and experience, while dealing with the bilateral relations with other countries in the future.

At the Seventeenth Session of the Eleventh National People’s Congress, it voted Social Insurance Law. The draft of Social Insurance Law was firstly examined by the National People’s Congress in the end of 2007. In these three years, it has been examined four times by the National People’s Congress.