The time for passport registration at police stations in Beijing has been remarkably shortened. Police of Chaoyang District revealed yesterday that Chaoyang Public Security Bureau has widely adopted an information management service system for foreigners.

Passport information registration used to be completed manually but now it takes only about one minute to scan a passport with this new system.

There is a large population of foreigners at Chaoyang District. Nanhu police station alone has registered more than 10,000 foreigners.

Policemen found out in their work that some foreigners were reluctant to register their passports at police stations because it takes a long period of time, sometimes over 10 minutes, to register passport information manually and there is a good chance of mistakes.

To solve these problems, Chaoyang Public Security Bureau's Exit-Entry Administration Department worked with a sci-tech company and jointly developed this information management system for foreigners.

The system includes 14 items such as name, age, nationality and passport number and is capable of passport scanning, automatic information input and quick search.

Since Nanhu police station started a pilot operation of this system, it can register information of 60 passports every hour, a speed nearly 10 times faster than before, and the registered information is 100% accurate.

(Chinanews.com October 26, 2005)