Beijing - More than four million tourists visited China’s Tibet region this year, more than double the number in 2005 before a new railway linked the remote area with the rest of China, state media said on Monday.
The region expects to have received 4,02 million tourists by the end of 2007, an increase of 64 percent from the 2,45 million in 2006, the official People’s Daily newspaper and other media said.
About 1,7 million tourists travelled to Tibet in 2005, the year before the opening of a 1 142-kilometre line linking the regional capital, Lhasa, with the Chinese rail network.
The tourism boom is expected to bring revenue of 4,8 billion yuan this year, up 73 percent from 2006, Zhang Qingli, the Tibet regional secretary of China’s ruling Communist Party, said at an economic work conference on Sunday.
“The golden time of Tibet tourism has come,” the newspaper quoted Zhang as saying.
The opening of the railway, overseas promotion of the region and the addition of a third civilian airport all helped to spur the rapid growth of tourism, he said.
Tourism revenue already accounted for almost 10 percent of the region’s gross domestic product last year, Zhang said.
Tibet is one of China’s poorest and least developed regions, but critics see some development projects as cementing Chinese rule and encouraging non-Tibetans to migrate into the region.
Many overseas Tibetan activists have called for a boycott of the new railway, saying it will speed up environmental damage and the migration of ethnic Chinese people into the region.
The Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist leader of Tibet, in January said the railway had already allowed the start of a “second invasion of Tibet” by Chinese migrants.
Authorities in Lhasa have begun building a huge new district to help the city accommodate an influx of tourists and migrants, state media said last month.
The government said the regional population increased to 2,81 million last year, but its figures apparently do not include the tens of thousands of temporary migrants and soldiers who live there. - Sapa-dpa
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