In times past, business people in China had to wait for overseas business to come to them and most people could only dream of traveling to distant countries. But things have changed in this increasingly open and market-oriented country.

"We used to have to wait for customers to call us, due to tedious formalities for traveling abroad for business opportunities," said Liu Junquan, general manager of Mark Cheung based in Zhongshan city, south China's Guangdong Province. "Now it is much easier for us to go abroad."

Thanks to the simplification of passport application, the lamp sector of Zhongshan's Guzhen Town has gone international. Business people from many private firms in the town now often travel to Europe, America and the Middle East for expositions and trade fairs.

The business opportunities gained through these travels helped increase the number of lamp enterprises from 1,100 to more than 1, 400 in the town in the past year alone. Among them export companies grew from 28 to 73.

The simplified passport application procedure, which was introduced in April 2001 on a trial basis in Zhongshan, requires only ID cards and permanent residence documents. In early November, the reform spread to Guangzhou, the provincial capital, and on to the whole Pearl River Delta, an economically developed area in south China.

Ren Yingchao, a passport administrator of the Ministry of Public Security, said though the simplification of the passport application procedure was a small reform, it represents a big step forward the government has had in fulfilling its commitments to the World Trade Organization and improving public service.

Statistics show that from 1949 to 1978, only 210,000 Chinese people were allowed to go abroad, about 7,000 a year. The figure became 50,000 per year in the 1979-1985 period. From 1986, when new rules on exit and entry took effect, until 2001, a total of 18. 1 million people were approved to go outside China for private purposes, an average of 1.13 million annually.

The easing of restrictions has also spurred outbound tourism in the Pearl River Delta. According to the Guangdong provincial tourism administration, four million tourists went overseas for personal purposes last year, up 910,000, or 29.66 percent, from a year earlier.

(Eastday.com November 13, 2002)