SINGAPORE, May 8 (Reuters) – China is hammering out details with Singapore on a bilateral visa-free travel arrangement, according to Beijing’s embassy, a move that could boost arrivals in the city-state from what was its biggest pre-pandemic tourism market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were 3.6 million Chinese visitors to Singapore in 2019, more than any other country, who spent a combined S$4.1 billion ($3.09 billion).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many Chinese have in recent years been keen to invest, move\u00a0assets or relocate<\/a>\u00a0to Singapore, with some buying into\u00a0luxury<\/a>\u00a0real estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among Singapore’s 4 million citizens and permanent residents, three-quarters are of Chinese ethnicity and many speak Mandarin, making it easy for mainland Chinese to navigate the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It is something that citizens of both countries are eagerly awaiting, and is also a shared concern for the leaders of both countries,” a spokesperson for China’s embassy in Singapore said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Singapore’s foreign ministry did not respond to Reuters request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chinese travellers at present are required to apply for visas to visit Singapore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Singaporeans were allowed 15-day visa-free visits prior to the pandemic. That arrangement has yet to be reinstated, which has led to lengthy queues, some overnight, at the Chinese visa application centre in Singapore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Chinese ambassador to Singapore Sun Haiyan wrote in a Facebook post last month: “Hope that the competent authorities of the two sides can achieve positive results as soon as possible.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n ($1 = 1.3273 Singapore dollars)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SINGAPORE, May 8 (Reuters) – China is hammering out details with Singapore on a bilateral visa-free travel arrangement, according to Beijing’s embassy, a move that could boost arrivals in the city-state from what was its biggest pre-pandemic tourism market. There were 3.6 million Chinese visitors to Singapore in 2019, more than any other country, who […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":5188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,81,396],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia","category-china","category-latest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiafreepress.com\/en_gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}