China 'systematically' denies access to Tibet: US Congress report

An exiled Tibetan shouts slogans as he is being taken to a police station in a bus during a protest outside the Chinese Embassy, in New Delhi, India, in this March 9, 2018, file photo. AP-Yonhap

Foreign diplomats, journalists and tourists were "systematically" denied access to China's Tibet autonomous region over the past year, according to a new U.S. government assessment, indicating that Washington's efforts to pressure China into opening up the tightly guarded region have not succeeded.

Compounded by the coronavirus pandemic and China's closure of the U.S. embassy in neighboring Sichuan Province, there was no sign of a loosening of restrictions compared with 2020, the State Department said in an annual report to Congress published Thursday.

The obstacles, the report alleged, included harassment of U.S. journalists, the stonewalling of diplomats' engagement with locals in Tibetan areas outside Tibet and the refusal by the Chinese government to greenlight any visits to Tibet by the U.S. charge d'affaires at its Beijing embassy.

In one incident, a U.S. diplomat reported being blocked from boarding a plane during a personal trip to a Tibetan prefecture ― referring to one of the areas outside Tibet that are home to large populations of ethnic Tibetans. Another was prevented from accessing a prefecture on a cycling tour.

"[China's] security forces used conspicuous monitoring to intimidate U.S. diplomats and officials including while on personal travel to Tibetan areas, followed them, prevented them from meeting or speaking with local contacts, harassed them and restricted their movement in these areas," the report said.

The dire assessment comes despite attempts by Washington to force Beijing to relax the limits it has long imposed on Tibet, including by sanctioning Chinese officials involved in formulating or enacting those restrictions.

Asked about the report, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said that the State Department's accusations "disregard the facts and are fraught with bias."

China would continue to welcome foreigners to Tibet for travel and business, Liu said, "but the precondition is that they must abide by the Chinese laws and relevant regulations and go through necessary procedures."

Beijing has previously characterized the U.S. law requiring the annual report as a form of "foreign interference."

That law, the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2018, also directs the U.S. administration to place visa restrictions on Chinese officials considered "substantially involved" in policies that restrict access to Tibet.

The Chinese government has cited U.S. sanctions as well as Washington's appointment of officials to specific Tibet-related roles in its decision not to allow any U.S. embassy visits to the region in recent years, according to the State Department.

The report also noted that U.S. efforts to access Tibet had been "severely" constrained by China's closure of Washington's consulate in Sichuan's Chengdu in July 2020 ― in retaliation to the U.S. government's closure of a Chinese consulate in Houston over accusations of espionage.

Besides issues around diplomatic access, the number of U.S. citizens traveling to Tibet in 2021 decreased "substantially" because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to State Department estimates.

A protester holds a placard reading 'Shame on China' during a protest march gathering Tibetans from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquarters to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, ahead of the opening of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, in this Feb. 3 file photo. AFP-Yonhap

But the report also said that rejections of tourists' applications to visit had increased around politically sensitive times, including the March anniversary of the 1959 uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule and the Dalai Lama's birthday in July.

Despite the remote and sparsely populated western region experiencing low infection rates during the pandemic, authorities in Tibet and surrounding provinces implemented "heavily" restrictive travel limits that had stayed in place for much of the past year, according to the report.

The restrictions, alleged the State Department, were used by the Chinese authorities as a "pretext" for detaining, harassing or removing U.S. journalists from reporting in regions near Tibet.

As for requests by foreign journalists to visit Tibet itself, none of the four known applications over the past year had been approved, according to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China's annual report released earlier this year.

However, the Chinese government did organize a number of invite-only tours for journalists to Tibet, including one in May for international outlets to cover commemorative activities marking 70 years since the "peaceful liberation of Tibet."

Those who were selected for such tours were "closely watched and prevented from visiting locations or meeting people other than those presented by [Chinese] officials hosting the tour," the State Department said.

The report laid out a "comprehensive lack of access for Americans," said Franz Matzner, government relations director at the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet. "Which is partly why [the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act] is so important: to document the restrictions on access and keep the pressure on the Chinese government."

The State Department report comes weeks after Freedom House, a U.S.-based international democracy watchdog, ranked Tibet as the least free territory in the world ― alongside Syria and South Sudan ― for the second year in a row.