From what I've read about the hk-mainland travel bubble plan, mainland flights are going to be completely segregated from the others. Supposedly the new system will be in place by December 1 on a hybrid basis, and fully implemented in February.

Yes, hopefully once the new segregation is implemented we will stop reading about these positive cases that transited Hong Kong.

TIL that you can qualify for a green code to China as a visitor in Korea by staying there for 28 days:

https://www.mfa.gov.cn/ce/cekor//chn/lsfw/t1905551.htm

You certainly used to need a boarding pass to be able to go through transit security, checked by both a human and read by machine. Unless the passenger had a 2nd boarding pass...

Yes but they may not be checking the destination on the boarding pass, could just be checking the validity. We've had multiple cases of people transiting HK to China who ended testing positive, that means even more cases probably have made it through who didn't test positive since the positivity rate of inbound passengers is less than 1%.

The proposed segregation might finally put an end to these transits.

China is definitely going to be segregated. Based on the SCMP article, it appears that they are trying to figure out a way to add Australia and Singapore to the mix. From an industrial engineering perspective, this is a daunting task unless the solution entails mixing those three groups of passengers. I'm just happy that they are finally making a serious attempt to pull this off. I would love to be able to go to Thailand, but Hong Kong is an excellent consolation prize.

If it’s anything like the Macau setup, they won’t let us foreigners living on the mainland participate in any scheme they setup.

Agreed. Unless any of us becomes the CEO of Apple during the next week, we're relegated to the February edition.

The China to Hong Kong border is already open for foreigners (first arrival on 15 September) without quarantine. But only HK residents can fly in from China, the rest of us have to do the land border crossing from Shenzhen, Macao or Zhuhai unless you fancy staying in a quarantine hotel for 7/14 days.

Of course going the other way entails 14+7 days of quarantine and monitoring. But word is that this may change starting from mid-December with a strict quota and then expanding further in February.

If you can overlook the quarantine, going from Hong Kong to China is actually surprisingly easy. You don't even need a pre-flight PCR test, just get your ticket to a mainland city and off you go. Or you can cross at one of the two land borders but that requires a prior booking (just a formality as not that many people cross due to the quarantine) and a PCR test before crossing.

Not necessarily. From what I've seen the big difference between Dec and Feb is that only business travel would be allowed at first. So if you can somehow qualify your travel *to* China as business-related then it could work earlier than Feb.

It does indeed sound easy; if, as you say, you can overlook the 21 days in jail upon arrival 😂. I love won ton noodle soup and iced lemon tea in TST but even still I think I’ll wait.

One of our forum regulars pulled off Macau without having to do q upon return. I'm not completely surprised that Macau received love before HK.

Well up until this summer Hong Kong was still contemplating a travel bubble with Singapore, as well as reduced quarantine for vaccinated arrivals from places like the UK and the US, no wonder it wasn't getting any love from China.

With my escape flight from Shanghai to London, via a transit in Vienna, on November 29th fast approaching.....and with a hopeful return to China late February 2022, I thought I'd ask if anyone has had experience of arriving at Chinese immigration/border control with a new passport and their residency permit in the old one. My ever enthusiastic and sometimes helpful Public Security Bureau chief in Handan is saying, "no worries, no problems, just make sure they put the new arrival stamp in the new passport, everything will be ok"....but with having to fill in so many online forms just to get the green code I remain sceptical......

I believe the rule is you need to transfer the RP over to the new passport within 7 days of receiving it. But I have only done this when getting my new passport inside China. Not sure how it works if you get a new passport when you’re outside of China. If at all possible I’d hold off on the new passport until you’re back in China or switch the RP over before you leave.