China is introducing a digital health “passport” to aid with the recovery of outbound travel and tourism in the months ahead.
Wang Yi, a minister with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said the passport, a kind of health certificate, is designed to allow China and other countries to verify the result of a traveler’s Covid-19 test and whether that person has been vaccinated against the virus and has met the requirements of “fully protected personal privacy”.
He also revealed plans to set up regional vaccination sites using Chinese-made vaccines for overseas Chinese and Chinese nationals currently in countries outside of China.
A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said the health certificate would be available in digital and paper form with the certificate-holder’s NAT and IgG antibody test results and vaccination status on record. All the information will be encrypted in a QR code that can be verified, decrypted and read by a public key provided by the Chinese side.
He added that China is ready to discuss mutually recognizable mechanisms for health codes that will “facilitate the issuance of visas, thus making cross-border travel much easier.”
“The pandemic is still with us, but the world economy needs to be restarted and people-to-people exchanges resumed with no more delays,” he told reporters at a recent press conference in Beijing. “As countries are stepping up vaccination efforts, mutual recognition of vaccination has become part and parcel to mutual recognition of health codes among countries.”
