Beijing sees surging cross-border travel in 2025
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
More than 20 million exit and entry passenger trips had been recorded via Beijing exit and entry frontier inspection stations so far this year as of early Saturday morning, the highest number since 2020, according to local authorities.
This figure, of which foreign passengers accounted for 30 percent, is 1.1 times the level of the whole of 2024, the Beijing General Station of Exit and Entry Frontier Inspection revealed.
Over 6 million border crossings by foreign nationals had been recorded as of early Saturday morning, up 34.5 percent from the same period last year. About 1.86 million entries were facilitated by visa exemption policies, 1.9 times the number recorded in 2024 and accounting for 60 percent of total entries of foreign nationals.
Statistics showed that nearly half of these foreign passengers had traveled as tourists, while the rest were on business trips or traveled to visit friends or family.
The surge was partly boosted by China’s continuous optimization of visa-free policies. By the end of last month, China had established mutual visa exemption agreements with 29 countries and unilaterally offered visa-free entry to nationals of 48 countries, spanning Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
To ensure efficient and smooth border crossings, the Beijing General Station of Exit and Entry Frontier Inspection has adopted multiple measures to facilitate customs clearance. Starting from Nov. 20, foreign visitors are able to complete their arrival cards online beforehand, while guidance signs were added at ports to assist passengers entering the country.
Reference Link:- https://english.news.cn/20251206/9e4ed0d503b847669e510b05637caef5/c.html
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
