61,000 residents seek Hong Kong document for 5-year mainland travel permit

Another 29,000 Hong Kong permanent residents with foreign passports have applied in the past two months for an Immigration Department document needed to get a new five-year travel permit to enter mainland China.

The department said on Sunday that it had received more than 61,000 applications from permanent residents who wanted a five-year multi-entry travel permit to the mainland as of September 30.

The figure was nearly double the 32,000 applications the department had received in July, the month applications opened.

“Since the launch on July 10, the permit has been very popular among non-Chinese residents in the city,” Director of Immigration Benson Kwok Joon-fung told a radio programme.

Several documents are needed to obtain the permit through China Travel Service (Hong Kong) including a “Notice of Application for Access to Information” from the department.

The department earlier said it had deployed additional staff to work overtime to help ensure it could issue residents with the notice within 10 days.