Visa-free policy can consolidate people-to-people exchanges
China DailyBorder police officers check documents of travelers at a border checkpoint of the Shanghai Pudong International Airport in east China's Shanghai, March 14, 2024. The National Immigration Administration predicted in late April that the average daily number of people entering and leaving China's ports during the five-day holiday would reach 1.76 million, an increase of 40.5 percent over the same period last year. In the first quarter of this year, China introduced a series of entry-exit policy measures to facilitate foreigners' access to China by expanding visa-free entry for certain foreign nationals, while vigorously improving governance and services. As a result, China saw more than 141 million inbound and outbound travels in the first quarter, an increase of 117.8 percent year-on-year, which also exceeded the full-year entry and exit flows in any of the three years during the COVID-19 pandemic. Greater entry and exit optimization policies adopted by some major Chinese cities have also resulted in a significant increase in their entry-exit personnel flows in the first quarter of this year.