Nine new countries granted visa-free travel to China — UK misses out

Nine new countries have been granted visa-free travel to China, but it’s bad news for British tourists.

From November 30, travellers from Bulgaria, Romania, Malta, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Estonia, Latvia and Japan are permitted to travel to China and stay for up to 30 days without a visa.

That brings to 38 the number of countries granted visa-free access since last year. However the UK is not one of them; anyone travelling on a British passport needs a visa to visit mainland China.

The exception to this is the island province of Hainan, which UK citizens can visit without a visa.

The most popular option is the single-entry Tourist (L) Visa which is valid for 90 days and costs £130 plus service fees. To apply, an application containing 51 questions must be submitted along with your passport and a passport photo.

The latest visa expansion isn’t a permanent measure — for now it’s only in place until December 31, 2025.

This isn’t the first time Japan has enjoyed visa-free access, as it was one of the three countries permitted to do before Covid.

Recurring lockdowns saw China revoke this privilege, a decision the Japanese government has pushed to reverse for the past four years.

‘We hope the visa exemption measure announced by the Chinese side will contribute to further smooth our exchanges between Japan and China,’ Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters in Tokyo.

The new policy is different to Japan’s pre-Covid allowances, as previously, it covered 15 days rather than 30 days.

The move is intended to boost tourism and business travel to China, which saw the number of international visitors decrease to 27.5 million in 2020 after the start of the pandemic.

This increased in 2021, reaching 32 million, but by 2023, numbers had lifted to just 82 million – still lower than pre-pandemic levels of about 145.3 million in 2019.

It’s not just the nine new countries that have been granted easier access to China this year: passport holders from Andorra, Finland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovakia and Norway were also recently approved for the same visa.

Meanwhile, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, Portugal and Slovenia were given the green light in October, meaning that the total number of European countries with visa-free access now stands at 38.

As for the UK, British passport holders haven’t been included in the gradual rollout just yet – and still need to pay a minimum of £151 for a visa, whether they want to wander the streets of Beijing or travel the original Silk Road.

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