The Residence Permit for Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan Residents is an

identity document An identity document (also called ID or colloquially as papers) is any documentation, document that may be used to prove a person's identity. If issued in a small, standard credit card size form, it is usually called an identity card (IC, ID c ...

in the People's Republic of

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. It is issued to ''de jure'' Chinese nationals who do not have

household registration Civil registration is the system by which a government records the vital events (births, marriages, and deaths) of its citizens and residents. The resulting repository or database has different names in different countries and even in differen ...

mainland China "Mainland China" is a geopolitical term defined as the territory governed by the People's Republic of China (including islands like Hainan or Chongming), excluding dependent territories of the PRC, and other territories within Greater China. ...

and are permanent residents of

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

Macau Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a pop ...

, or Taiwanese nationals, have lived in mainland China for over half a year, and either have a stable job, a stable domicile or attend school continuously in mainland China. Applications for this card first opened on 1 September 2018.

Background

Until the introduction of the residence permit, residents of these places could only use their mainland travel permits as identity document in mainland China. Since the mainland travel permits have a different format from the

resident identity card The Resident Identity Card () is an official identity document for personal identification in the People's Republic of China. According to the second chapter, tenth clause of the ''Resident Identity Card Law'', residents are required to apply ...

for mainland Chinese residents, this caused trouble in situations where only the resident identity card can be used. The residence permit is designed to be similar to the resident identity card to let its holders enjoy the same basic public services and convenience as mainland Chinese residents.

Residence permit has a citizen identification number in the same format as resident identity card. This is the first time that the Chinese government ever assigns a number to residents of these places. The address codes of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan for the identification number are 810000, 820000 and 830000 respectively. The contents on the permit are mostly the same as those on the resident identity card; the differences are that there are number of issuances and mainland travel permit number on the obverse side, and there is no ethnicity on the reverse side.

References

{{Taiwan and Taiwan-related Identity and Travel Documents Government of Hong Kong Government of Macau Mainland Travel Permit

Travel Permit In the ticketing system of the British rail network, a Permit to Travel provisionally allows passengers to travel on a train when they have not purchased a ticket in advance and the ticket office of the station they are travelling from is closed ...

Residency

Background

Contents

References