The Approved Destination Status (ADS) is a programme developed by the Chinese government to establish a well-managed, orderly and controlled system of travel abroad for a greater number of its citizens. It is based on a bilateral agreement whereby a foreign government allows Chinese tourists to travel to its territory.
The Chinese people no longer need to have direct contacts with the embassies or consulates in order to obtain a visa to ADS countries. The assessment of the visa applications is then executed by official outbound travel agents authorized by the China National Tourism Administration. Since the system was introduced by China in 1995, many countries have already been granted this status by the Chinese government. The amount of ADS approved countries now numbers around 100.
The ADS-system enables the Mainland Chinese to use personal passports and apply for tourism visas to countries approved for visitation. However, the visas are restricted by the itinerary, which has to be fixed at the beginning of the trip. Travelers are obliged to travel in a tour group and are not allowed to extend their stay or apply for other types of visas.
In short,the ADS-system enables people to travel for pleasure on their own expenses to destinations with this status. This means, purely travel for pleasure is not allowed to non-ADS countries. If Chinese people want to travel to non-ADS countries, their trip must include business, study or a Visiting Friends or Relatives (VFR) component in order to attain a visa. Each destination country needs to negotiate individually with the CNTA in order to be granted ADS.
Related articles - Tourism, People's Republic of China
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- This page was last modified by Admin. Previous modification to this article was done on 00:14, 13 Aug 2006 by Wikipedia user Miborovsky. Based on work by Wikipedia user(s) DabMachine, Commander Keane bot, SimonP, Shell Kinney, Melesse & Rashers11 and Anonymous user(s) of Wikipedia. Click here to view authors profile Pub date - 2009-05-15 10:49:11 Related resources:
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