The International Campaign for Tibet welcomes Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement of March 31 imposing additional visa restrictions on Chinese officials involved in denying visit to Tibet for Americans.
“We commend the Trump administration for asserting that China’s failure to adhere to the principle of reciprocity is ‘unacceptable’ and will not be tolerated,” said ICT President Tencho Gyatso. “This law was designed to challenge China’s restrictions on access to Tibet, and we hope that the United States will continue to make effective use of it until China stops trying to isolate the Land of Snows.”
Onerous restrictions
Tibetan Americans have taken the brunt of China’s discriminatory policy for travel which impacts not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, but also to all other Tibetan areas incorporated in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan, as recognized by the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act.
Pursuing access to Tibet for Americans does not constitute interference in Chinese internal affairs but rather an insistence on the diplomatic principle of reciprocity.
Continued disinformation
Rather than admitting to its discriminatory policy against Americans, China is instead spreading disinformation by making claims about Tibet’s “special geographical and climatic conditions” as justification for its restrictions. This is absurd on its face because China itself has admitted more than 55 million Chinese visitors to the Tibet Autonomous Region alone in 2024.
China’s disinformation can also be seen in its latest White Paper on Tibet, released on March 28, 2025. The claim that Tibetans are enjoying all manners of rights and privileges under the restrictive Communist regime has been disproven by decades of reports from the United States, United Nations, and other countries and media organizations. The fact that a series of heavy restrictions on access are still imposed on access to Tibet shows that despite all its claims China is aware that Tibetans are unhappy and does not want the world to know this.