Beijing launches city-wide 24-hour online exit-entry services, eliminating the need to visit passport halls

In a bid to make international travel paperwork as easy as buying a train ticket on a phone, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau’s Exit-Entry Administration rolled out a suite of fully online services on 22 May 2026. Under the upgrade, eligible Beijing household-registration residents—as well as holders of Beijing residence and work-residence permits—can now apply for renewal or replacement of ordinary passports, Home Return Permits, and Taiwan Compatriot Permits entirely through the National Immigration Administration’s “12367” mini-program. The new model turns what once required two or three in-person visits into a purely digital flow. Applicants receive proactive SMS reminders when passports are within six months of expiry and are guided to the mini-program, where facial-recognition login, e-signature, and online fee payment replace paper forms and manual cashiers. To tackle photo-quality rejections—previously the No. 1 cause of online application failures—the bureau has posted step-by-step “how to shoot a compliant document photo” videos on WeChat, Douyin and other short-video platforms, and embedded an AI cropping tool that checks background color, shadows, and head size in real time. A 24-hour bilingual (Chinese-English) human-staffed hotline on 12367 now provides “cloud tutoring” for applicants stuck in the process. Call-center agents can view failure codes in the back-end system and coach citizens to adjust lighting or camera angles, then monitor the application until it passes. Once approved, the document is produced centrally and delivered by secure courier within seven working days, turning “one trip to the hall” into “zero trips”. For would-be travelers already heading to a service hall, popular map apps such as Gaode (Amap) now display a pop-up suggesting the online route, diverting walk-in traffic and shortening queues for exceptional cases that still require a counter visit. According to bureau officials, the pass-rate of online applications has risen from 60 percent in January to 92 percent in May, and daily digital submissions have surpassed physical counter volumes for the first time.



Travelers who need extra guidance—or who are juggling additional visa requirements for other destinations—can turn to VisaHQ for streamlined support. Through its dedicated China portal (https://www.visahq.com/china/), VisaHQ offers step-by-step checklists, document pickup, and real-time status tracking for passports and visas worldwide, perfectly complementing Beijing’s new digital passport renewal service and filling gaps for trips that still require traditional embassy processing.

From a mobility-management perspective, Beijing’s move is a milestone in China’s push to digitize every stage of the traveler journey—visa, passport, arrival-card and eventually customs declaration—reducing administrative friction for both outbound Chinese business travelers and the city’s growing expatriate community. Corporations arranging last-minute trips can now renew employees’ passports without losing half a work-day, and travel-management companies anticipate lower lead-times for ticket issuance. The city plans to connect the system with airline and hotel platforms later this year so that passport renewals automatically update frequent-flyer and guest-profile records, further smoothing the road for seamless global mobility.