To: Marina Sisani
Increased Restrictions on Tourists in Tibet
The authorities in Tibet have increased restrictions on individual travellers in Tibet, with up to ten travel agencies closed down in the capital, a ban on individuals flying into the region, increased restrictions on foreigners travelling using public transport, and in one town a ban on foreigners eating outside the main hotel.
At least ten branch offices of the 42 travel companies in Lhasa were closed down on 4th June when police made a surprise raid on the agencies and ordered them to close down the same day, according to tourists who witnessed the incident.
"There were two or three police in uniform who came in while we were there," said Susan Charwell, an American student who was in a travel office when the closure orders were issued. "They said to the staff, "you're closed, it's an order" and said they had the rest of the day to finish business," she added.
The offices are still closed, according to travel companies in the capital who were not affected by the order. "There are over ten which have been closed down", said one travel agent contacted this week by phone in Lhasa. "There is no hope of them reopening."
The offices which have been closed down had operated as if they were private or independent agencies, specialising in arranging permits for closed areas for individual travellers. In fact all travel companies in Tibet are owned by the government or the military and the "private" agencies were loosely run sub-branches or affiliates of official companies, often operating under their own names from small offices in "backpacker" hotels.
A Tibetan travel operator whose office was amongst those closed down said that he and his colleagues had not broken any regulations, and that petitions to the local authorities asking them to reverse the closure orders had been rejected. "They say we have freedom but we can't even run a business here," commented the former operator, who asked not to be named.
Two of the small agencies - Potala Travel and Traffic Travel - are said to have been exempted from the order, but the best known, the Lhasa branch of the China International Travel Service (Shigatse), an agency based at the Yak hotel, is amongst those that was closed down.
A variety of reasons have been given for the closures, including tax irregularities, price cutting and low standards of practice. "The small travel agencies which have been closed did not provide a good travel service and all the western tourists complained about them," said a spokesman for Tibet International Sports and Travel, a large government agency contacted by phone in Lhasa.
Other observers say that the small agencies had been breaking regulations by arranging for tour groups to travel without guides, and said that the closures will make it easier for the authorities to regulate individual tourists, while at the same time keeping prices high. "While there are a lot of agencies, things are less expensive and people can go to a lot of places, but now prices will go up and it will be easier to restrict people," one Lhasa operator said, speaking off the record.
The closures are follow immediately after protests in May at Ganden Monastery, 40 km east of Lhasa, a major tourist site, and are thought to be connected. A number of French tourists were detained and questioned after police discovered that a French tourist had taken photographs of the protests, and police trailed a tour group from California for several days across Tibet in the hope of finding video film one of them was believed to have taken of the incident. The group had been operating through a small travel agency, and its trip to the monastery had been unscheduled.
- Only Group Tourists Allowed on Planes -
The closures follow the imposition of new regulations on 11th May this year forbidding individual travellers from buying airtickets for flights from Kathmandu to Lhasa. The new rules require all air travellers to have visas issued or endorsed by the Chinese Embassy in Nepal, which gives them only to members of tour groups after they have been cleared by the authorities in Lhasa. The Embassy now issues visas which are valid only for the duration of the tour, apparently to deter foreigners from staying on in Tibet as individuals after their tour has finished.
Tourists flying from Chengdu have faced similar restrictions for some years, but are less likely to have their visas limited to the duration of the tour.
Theoretically it is now impossible to enter Tibet without a special permit or a group visa, but in fact foreigners in Nepal can still enter Tibet as individuals if they walk across the land border at Dram-mo, 110 km north- east of Kathmandu. However, since May this year they cannot leave the border town unless they obtain am "Alien Travel Permit" and travel as a group to Lhasa, a 820 km trip that costs about US $100.
The restrictions do not affect foreigners who remain in Lhasa but mean that in most cases foreigners cannot travel out of the capital except with special permits and in hired landcruisers with official drivers.
Travel by public bus in Tibet is now believed to be possible without permits only on the road from Lhasa to Shigatse and on the road leading out of Tibet to Golmud in the neighbouring province of Qinghai. But travel going into Tibet on the same road from Golmud is strictly controlled. "The bus was stopped by police and searched five times from Golmud on the way to Lhasa," said Susan Charwell, who travelled by road from Qinghai in late June without a special permit. "I don't know what they were looking for, but at each checkpost the other people on the bus told me to get down and hide," added the 21 year old student from New York, who said two of the searches lasted over an hour.
Although Tibet is sometimes described as open to tourists, officially only three towns - Lhasa, Shigatse and Nagchu, plus the roads linking them and the Nepal border post at Dram-mo - have ever been declared open.
Since 1995, however, Shigatse has been closed to individual tourists on several occasions, the latest being on 28 May when a ceremony was held to mark the re-installation of the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama at a monastery in the town. Restrictions on other popular tourist destinations, such as Tsethang, Samye and Gyantse, have rarely been enforced until now.
A more unexpected restriction emerged this week when tour groups returning from Tibet reported that Tsethang, the third most important town in central Tibet, 80 km southeast of Lhasa, is now forbidding foreigners from eating except in the two main hotels.
"We were told we could eat only in the Tsethang Hotel or the Friendship Hotel, both owned by the government. If you go to other places they say they have received police notification that they will be fined if they serve tourists," said an American tour leader who returned this week from the area.
China has always insisted that foreigners can sleep only in approved hotels or hostels, but restrictions on where foreigners eat are rare.
The new restrictions follow politically sensitive periods last winter when almost all individuals were prevented from entering Tibet, namely all of December when the official Panchen Lama was enthroned, and the first three weeks of February during the Tibetan New Year festival, which was followed by major unrest in 1988 and 1989.
The constantly changing tourism regulations in Tibet may damage the tourism trade there, which was officially described three months ago as "a vital business which has increased Tibet's income and spurred the growth of many other economic sectors". In 1995, the Tibet Autonomous Region received more than 30,000 overseas tourists, plus 20,000 Chinese visitors, and earned 11.3 million US dollars in foreign exchange, an 8% increase over the previous year.
By the end of 1995 there were 108 businesses linked to the tourism industry, including 42 tourism agencies and 38 hotels with 2,570 rooms which are allowed to receive overseas, according to a Xinhua report on 12th April.
"Mythical Tibetan Buddhism and exotic folk customs have helped create a multi-million dollar tourism industry in Tibet," said the news agency. Real- life Buddhism however, remains sensitive, and last month a number of westerners who have become Buddhist monks or nuns reported that they were told they could not wearing their traditional maroon robes in public while visiting Tibet.
Tourists returning from Lhasa this week estimated that individual travellers in the capital were down by 75% and that many hotel rooms were empty. Some reported another new trend - individual tourists from the US and Germany are being refused visa extensions because of the recent positions taken by their governments over the Tibet issue.
Some travel operators in Lhasa announced last week that the minimum size of a tour group is to be raised to five, but the new regulation has not so far been confirmed by the Tibet Tourism authorities and could be an attempt to increase revenue. - end -
