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My Chinese wife is planning to visit China this summer and is normally resident with me in Austria. She has her Chinese passport and a EEA residency card (for Austria) as a spouse of an EU national (me). Normally Chinese passport control demands to see a visa of the destination country before permitting exit from China but she plans to present her EEA residency card to them. Has anyone got experience of how they react at the airport?

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    "... Chinese passport control demands to see a visa of the destination country ..." Are you sure about this? First of all, it is not common that when exiting a country, the exiting country's immigration officer verify that you are entitled to enter your intended destination. And even if they did, why should they require a specific mean of entitlement like a visa and not accept other documentation like a residence permit (which usually gives you more rights in the destination country than a regular visitor's visa)? Feb 23, 2015 at 0:55
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    Right, immigration doesn't generally care where you're going. It's the airline that cares. Feb 23, 2015 at 23:19
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    It's true what David King wrote there. The Chinese authorities do control whether you hold a valid visa for your destination or not. It's not about them checking for your destination country, it's about controlling where their people go. My wife's Chinese too and she got a stamp each time she LEFT China as well as when she entered. That may be strange to people from liberal countries but in many places it's usual. Mar 10, 2015 at 14:05
  • Everybody gets a stamp when leaving Mainland China. Or Japan. Or Indonesia. Or Malaysia. Or... you catch my drift. Plenty of countries have exit controls, and stamp passports.
    – dda
    Jan 29 at 7:23
  • @dda No, you missed the point. I'm a citizen of a Schengen country and I DON'T get a stamp when exiting and entering the Schengen Area. I did get a UK stamp when I travelled to the UK, but not a Schengen one, not even when returning. This a common practice around the world: citizens don't get their passports stamped in their home countries. But in China, they (apparently) do. Jan 30 at 18:53

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I have seen the claim that Chinese citizens must have a visa for the destination country before leaving China before - it was, of all places, posted on a Wikipedia talk page.

I can state categorically from first hand experience that it is not true. Last March, my family, who are PRC nationals, and I, British, went to Korea as part of a cruise. Because we were part of the cruise party and entering Korea via Jeju Island, Korea waives the visa requirement. There was no visa in my family's passports when we exited China. The official checking the passports did not look for a visa.

When travelling to the UK three years ago, we did have visas in the passports for the UK but were flying via Warsaw, which allows visa-free transit. The official checking documents for exit from China did not look at any page other than the photo page of the passport for my wife and daughter.

Thus rumours that PRC citizens must have a visa in their passport to exit the country are incorrect or more probably out of date. The airline will check that you have suitable documentation to go to the destination when you check in. The entry/exit official does not, in my experience, check anything beyond what you would normally expect.

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Quick answer: My wife's Chinese, she holds a Swiss residence permit and she has been back to China twice since receiving it. The EU residence permit is definitely enough.

She could not even obtain a visa for the EU since she's holding a residence permit, therefore that's the only option she has.

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In 2017, the Ministry of Public Security abandoned the practice of checking visas upon exit. Post-COVID, some ports of exit have de facto revived this procedure (probably in order to combat participation in organized crime in Southeast Asia; such practice is much more common in Guangdong and Fujian than other regions, and I've almost never heard of anyone being checked elsewhere). So likely they won't be checked at all.

But even in case they check, residency cards, green cards, etc., are fine. As they are not supposed to prohibit exit solely on the grounds that one don't possess a visa for the destination, nothing can really happen anyhow. The only real concern is that if authorities find out that they already have permanent residency abroad, there is a slim chance that household registration (hukou) would be cancelled.

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Your wife certainly won't be the first EU resident to depart from China. There are millions of people worldwide holding EEA residence permits and at least 350 thousand of them are Chinese citizens. The permits are well known by airline employees since they are fairly standardised across the participating countries:

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You won't have any problems departing for your destination.

Source: done it myself numerous times.

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  • Question is about Chinese immigration...
    – Relaxed
    Feb 22, 2015 at 23:51
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    There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese resident in Europe, I'm pretty sure Chinese immigration will have seen the cards before. Feb 23, 2015 at 0:00
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    This being an English-language site, the OP is pretty unlikely to run into any Chinese residents of the EU here. Feb 23, 2015 at 11:28
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    @jpatokal Surely there are Chinese residents of the EU who speak English, no? At least, the Chinese EU residents who live in the UK are likely to.
    – phoog
    Feb 25, 2015 at 0:17
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    @Rincewind42 Some EU residence cards or permits are certainly valid to travel to the UK… namely those issued by the UK itself, which is a full EU member and does use the “common format”! It's true that there are some differences with the Schengen area where a residence card from one country gives the holder extensive rights to travel to other coutries in the area but Chinese residents in the UK would typically hold a card very much like the OP's wife's Austrian residence permit so they could presumably provide valuable input (+1 to your answer for providing direct relevant experience, btw).
    – Relaxed
    Mar 8, 2015 at 13:18

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