A rare foreign visitor finds a Chinese tourist boom ─ Strangers in a strange land
Lhasa, Oct. 13.─ In front of the Jokhang temple at the heart of the Tibetan capital, excited members of a Chinese tour group pose in their new cowboy hats and snap photos to post on their microblogs for friends back home. Not far away, others pose in Tibetan garb in front of the Potala palace, traditional residence of the Dalai Lama. Many have experienced the recent Chinese pop-culture craze for things Tibetan, such as "The Tibet Code" (an historical thriller written in the style of "The Da Vinci Code"). Now they want the thrill of adventure travel themselves, and their numbers have soared, even as the number of foreigners visiting the region has declined.
A ban on foreigners travelling to Tibet was in effect in the spring, part of an annual restriction during politically sensitive March anniversaries of the Dalai Lama's flight to India in 1959 and the anti-Chinese riots in 2008. This year the ban was extended into the summer and autumn, as a series of self-immolations by Tibetans in protest at Chinese rule continued to roil Tibetan regions. Statistics for domestic visitor numbers are often misunderstood. They count the total number of times people check in at Tibet's hotels, not the total number of visitors to Tibet. Visitors increasingly stay at several hotels. But, even counted in that way, the numbers tell the story: 8.4m Chinese tourists visited in 2011, up from 3.7m in 2007. Foreign visitors (counted in the same way) fell to 270,800 in 2011, from a high of 365,400 in 2007. In 2008 just 68,000 foreigners visited Tibet.
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Naciones Unidas, Sep.26 (ACI/EWTN).─ El Arzobispo Dominique Mamberti, Secretario del Vaticano para las Relaciones con los estados, señaló que el Estado de derecho requiere un sistema jurídico que esté basado en el derecho natural.