China has reopened Tibet to foreign tourists, state media said yesterday, almost two months after imposing a ban ahead of politically sensitive anniversaries.
A group of 11 German travelers arrived in the regional capital of Lhasa late on Saturday, the Xinhua news agency said. The group was on a six-day tour that would take them to a number of “key scenic spots” before leaving for Nepal, Xinhua said.
China requires foreigners to obtain special permission to visit Tibet and routinely bars them from all Tibetan areas of the country during sensitive periods to keep news of unrest from leaking out.
The latest travel ban on foreigners came in February and last month because of the Tibetan New Year and anniversaries of Tibetan uprisings against Chinese rule. A man who answered the telephone at the Lhasa tourism bureau said he had not heard the news about the visitors.
Foreign visitors also were not allowed in ethnically Tibetan areas in Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan provinces. Telephones at government offices and tourism bureaus in those areas were not answered yesterday.
The China Daily newspaper published a photo of what appeared to be a group of foreign travelers in brightly colored windbreakers carrying hand luggage.
“German tourists arrived at the railway station in Lhasa,” read the caption on the paper’s Web site yesterday.
Xinhua said that more than 500 foreign tourists were expected to visit Tibet this month but did not give any details.
State media quoted officials as saying that travel was suspended to protect visitors. Authorities, wary of potential unrest, placed the region under de facto martial law, with troops, police patrols and checkpoints blanketing the area.
Despite small pockets of protests — mostly by monks — the period went by without any apparent major disturbances.
The Tibetan New Year, which began on Feb. 25, was subdued because of an unofficial boycott of festivities by Tibetans mourning those who died last spring in anti-government riots in Lhasa and Beijing’s subsequent crackdown.
Chinese officials say 22 people died, but Tibetans say many times more were killed in the March 14 violence, which sparked protests in Tibetan communities in Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai.
Another potentially explosive date was March 10, which marked the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule that resulted in the exile of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s Buddhist leader.
This year, Beijing also sought to commemorate the imposition of direct rule over the Himalayan region with a newly manufactured holiday crowned “Serf Liberation Day” on March 28. It marks the date when Beijing ended the 1959 Tibetan uprising.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS