New Travel Question

[yemmie]

Hi all,

 

My wife has decided we should fly to Hong Kong, take a bus to Shenzhen so we can visit her cousin and do some sightseeing, travel around in China, end at Wuhan, and fly back to America. My question is this. Can we enter Hong Kong and then into China without difficulty? She will have her Chinese Passport and her two year green card. I will have my American Passport with a Chinese visa (single entry of double entry if you think we need it). Will this work or is there anything else I need to know?

 

Thanks,

 

Yemmie

[Amaro]

Not an expert at this, Americans are allowed to enter hong kong without a visa. Chinese citizens would need a visa, I believe you can buy it when you get there, dont quote me on it. Then you can use your chinese visa in hong kong to get into china. She would just use her chinese passport. Hope this helps!

[Randy W]

Not an expert at this, Americans are allowed to enter hong kong without a visa. Chinese citizens would need a visa, I believe you can buy it when you get there, dont quote me on it. Then you can use your chinese visa in hong kong to get into china. She would just use her chinese passport. Hope this helps!

 

Except that green card holders would NOT need a visa for Hong Kong.

[yemmie]

Thanks guys. This really helps. I guess we will go that route if the airplane ticket prices are not higher. You never know because they do some strange things with pricing depending on where you are going.

[HongKong2LA]

Visa HQ

 

This is a really neat site. It will allow you to check visa requirements taking into account citizenship AND residency. Looks like a chinese citizen even living in the US will need a visa to visit HK. I wouldn't think it would be too hard to get one though.

[DongDong]

Yemmie,

 

My wife is from Chongqing and her parents live in Shenzhen. We flew into Hong Kong, took the bus from the airport to Shenzhen for a short stay. Then we flew from Shenzhen to Chongqing and back after a few weeks and eventually went back though Hong Kong to the states.

My wife had her Chinese passport (with her name changed to match her green card) and green card, my stepdaughter had her Chinese passport with her green card and our daughter and I had US passports with 90 day visas. There were no issues going any direction. We had specifically listed the cities and addresses we planned to visit (when we knew them) in the visa application process for our daughter and me.

 

One very helpful thing my wife lined up for us when we traveled out of Shenzhen back to Hong Kong was a bus service that allows you to ¡®ride¡¯ your way through customs. This is much faster and you are not dragging bags on and off buses and walking then standing/ waiting in line. You simply board a six to eight passenger bus in Shenzhen and they take you to HKG, sort of like a truck load of vegetables.

 

One side note: My step daughter does not have the same last name as I do, because her father will not let her. I am fortunate that I get her here in the US with her mother, so I don¡¯t bitch too much. However, when we came back to the US and went through customs at ORD it was my stepdaughter that got grilled. She was asked in rapid fire after the grueling trip there: Is this your mother? How old are you? Where do you live? What grade are you in? When does school start? I gotta love my step daughter though (and for many other reasons). She nailed all of these questions! She told the customs official, ¡°I am not in school, I have completed 5th grade and I will be going into 6th grade¡±. She even knew when school started (I didn¡¯t, am I bad ) and all the correspondence for the upcoming school year was at home waiting for us in the mail.

[Eric]

My wife and I always fly in and out of Hong Kong and stay a couple of days during our trips to the Mainland. My wife has never had or needed a HK travel permit/visa for this. A PRC citizen entering HK from a country other than Mainland China is allowed to enter and is given a 7 day stay visa stamp upon arrival. A PRC citizen holding a valid US visa or green card can enter HK via the Mainland and will likewise receive a 7 day stay visa stamp upon arrival. My wife has never been asked for proof of onward flights to the Mainland or the US when entering HK but is always asked for proof of her flight out of HK to the US when departing China.

[Daviation]

We've transited through HK many times without HK visa for my spouse with GC, including onward travel to mainland via bus, train and/or airplane.

 

Prior to her coming to America, she met me many times in HK coming from the mainland. In those cases, of course she always had HK visa, but not required for HK transit now that she is US permanent resident.