South China Morning Post published this video item, entitled “China immigration official says 1.35 million applied for passports, visas since Jan 8” – below is their description.
An official from China’s immigration bureau said on January 13, 2023, that 1.35 million people had applied for passports as well as Hong Kong and Macau visas since January 8, the date the country opened its borders after three years. The reopening was one of the last steps in China’s dismantling of its zero-Covid regime, which began in December 2022, after rare protests against curbs that kept the virus at bay for three years but caused widespread frustration among its people and severe damage to the world’s second-largest economy.
Related story:
Mainland rush to return to Hong Kong, Macau post zero-Covid nears 1 million https://sc.mp/dsrq
Got a comment? Leave your thoughts in the comments section, below. Please note comments are moderated before publication.
About This Source - South China Morning Post
The South China Morning Post (SCMP), with its Sunday edition, the Sunday Morning Post, is a Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper founded in 1903. It is Hong Kong’s newspaper of record, owned by Alibaba Group.
China is the third largest country in the world by area and the largest country in the world by population. Properly known as the People’s Republic of China, the political territory of the country includes Tibet and Hong Kong. The capital is Beijing.
Covid-19 is the official WHO name given to the novel coronavirus which broke out in late 2019 and began to spread in the early months of 2020.
Symptoms of coronavirus
The main symptoms of coronavirus are:
a persistent new cough (non productive, dry)
a high temperature (e.g. head feels warm to the touch)
shortness of breath (if this is abnormal for the individual, or increased)
Latest News about Covid-19
Below are stories from around the globe related to the 2020 outbreak of novel Coronavirus – since the WHO gave the Covid-19 naming. Most recent items are posted nearest the top.
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (HKSAR), is a metropolitan area and special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta of the South China Sea. With over 7.5 million residents of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the Qing Empire ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The whole territory was transferred to China in 1997. As a special administrative region, Hong Kong maintains separate governing and economic systems from that of mainland China under the principle of “one country, two systems”.