Taiwan eases visa applications for Macau, HK residents

Taipei city

Macau and Hong Kong passport- holders can now apply online for multiple-entry visas to visit Taiwan, the island-state’s authorities announced this week.

However, residents of the territories who also hold other passports will not be eligible for this privilege, Taiwanese authorities cautioned.

The latest change to visa requirements for residents of the two SARs follows other recent relaxations for single-entry and double- entry visas to Taiwan.

Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency announced in December last year that it would permit SAR residents who arrive in Taiwan on cruise ships to apply for double-entry visas. The change was thought to impact around 20,000 residents of the two SARs who visited the island in 2016.

Then in February this year, the Immigration Age

cy opened online applications to SAR residents, meaning that they no longer had to visit the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office establishments in Hong Kong and Macau.

According to media reports, obtaining a visa upon arrival in Taiwan will also remain an option for residents of Hong Kong and Macau.

Visitors from the two SARs account for a significant portion of Taiwan’s visitors. Nearly 1 million people from Hong Kong and Macau visited the island in the first seven months of this year, up by 7.16 percent compared with the same period last year.

The number of visitors has steadily risen and they have therefore grown in importance to Taiwan’s tourism sector over the past few years. Some 1.06 million Hong Kong and Macau visitors traveled to Taiwan in 2014, while 1.18 million and 1.26 million visited the island in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

The rise in absolute figures is complemented by an increase in their proportion of Taiwan’s total number of visitors due to a decline in the number of mainland visitors.

Mainlanders are less intent on visiting Taiwan since Tsai Ing-wen, the country’s president, assumed office in May 2016. Tsai’s refusal to endorse Beijing’s ‘One China’ principle has caused the rift between the two states to widen, culminating in the severing of some cross-strait ties.