ANALYSIS: China shuts down Everest over coronavirus

Issued on: 12/03/2020 - 09:42Modified: 12/03/2020 - 11:41  GMT/ZULU

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Kathmandu 

 by Coco Jiang and Biodun Iginla, France24 News Analysts

China has cancelled permits for Mount Everest because of the coronavirus, expedition organisers said Thursday, ahead of the spring climbing season on the world's highest peak.

Last year's traffic-clogged spring window saw a record 885 people summit Everest, 644 of them from Nepal and 241 from the northern flank in Tibet.

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The Nepal side remains open for now although some expedition operators have seen cancellations and climbers have been asked to submit a 14-day travel history and medical reports.

The Chinese authorities "have informed us that the mountain will close from the north side," Lukas Furtenbach of Austria-based Furtenbach Adventures told us at France24. 

Furtenbach said that he will be shifting his 11 clients to Nepal.

Tourist areas in Tibet have been closed since January, according to the local tourism office. The China Tibet Mountaineering Association, which issues permits for Everest, was not reachable.

Another company, Alpenglow Expeditions, has cancelled its Everest plans.

"I am in agreement with China's decision. It is responsible... Climbing a mountain is not currently worth the transmission risk in the Base Camps, nor upon returning home," Adrian Ballinger of Alpenglow Expeditions said in a statement Wednesday.

Some companies in Nepal have also seen cancellations.

"We had bookings from 23 climbers, but two groups have already cancelled. We might have just 8 to 10 climbers this year," said Pasang Tenje Sherpa of Pioneer Adventure.

A Nepali team, specialised in fixing the climbing route, is currently on its way to the base camp to begin fixing ropes on Everest.

Everest attracts hundreds of mountaineers from all over the world each spring, when a window of good weather opens up between late April and the end of May, prompting a rush for the summit.

Nepal has so far seen only one confirmed case of the coronavirus.

It has suspended visas on arrival for visitors from eight countries badly hit, meaning they have to apply beforehand and submit a health certificate.

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Climbers Alex Lowe and David Bridges' bodies found in Tibet after 16 years

• 10 minutes ago

by Coco Jiang and Biodun Iginla, BBC News, Lhasa

• From the section Asia

Image copyright Alex Lowe Foundation

Image caption Alex Lowe (L) and David Bridges were close friends as well as regular climbing partners

The bodies of two American climbers have been found in a glacier in the Himalayas, 16 years after they were killed by a huge avalanche.

World-renowned mountaineer Alex Lowe had been climbing the 8,013m (26,290ft) Shishapangma peak in Tibet in October 1990 with cameraman David Bridges when they were hit.
They were found by two climbers last week, still trapped in the ice.
Mr Lowe's wife, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, said they had been "frozen in time".

• BBC report from 1999: 'Cyber reports of mountain tragedy'

'Closure and relief'

Mr Lowe, 40, was considered one of the greatest mountain climbers of his generation and was well known in the climbing community for having rescued several other climbers.

He and Mr Bridges, 29, were close friends as well as climbing partners, and had been scouting a route up Shishapangma, the 14th highest mountain in the world.

Image copyright Alex Lowe Foundation

Image caption Alex Lowe was considered one of the greatest mountaineers of his generation

The discovery of their bodies was announced on Friday by Mrs Lowe-Anker, who now runs a charitable foundation in her late husband's name with her new husband, Conrad Anker.
Mr Anker had been on Shishapangma with the two climbers on the day of the avalanche but escaped with minor injuries. He and other climbers spent days searching for the missing pair.
He married Alex Lowe's widow in 2001 and adopted her two children with the mountaineer.
The couple were in Nepal with their charity last week when they received a call from climbers David Goettler and Ueli Steck, saying they had found two bodies "still encased in blue ice but beginning to emerge from the glacier", said Mrs Lowe-Anker.
They described the clothing and equipment to Mr Anker, who said it was "undoubtedly" the missing pair, said the charity's statement.
Mr Anker told Outside magazine that it was "fitting" the men were found by climbers.
"It wasn't a yak herder. It wasn't a trekker. David and Ueli are both cut from the same cloth as Alex and me."

Image copyright Alex Lowe Foundation

Image caption Alex Lowe had rescued several other climbers during his career

The bodies are now expected to be recovered from the mountain.
Mr Anker said the discovery "brings closure and relief for me and Jenni and for our family".
Mrs Lowe-Anker said she and her husband and sons with Mr Lowe would now travel to Shishapangma, saying: "It is to put Alex to rest."

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Around the BBC

Tibet's exiles: the constant search for home

Nov 5, 1:59 AM EST

By Susan Kumar and Biodun Iginla, News Analysts, BBC News Website

AP Photo/Tsering Topgyal World Video

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DHARAMSALA, India  -- When I was 8 years old, my parents paid a smuggler to take me across the Himalayas, a weekslong walk over the mountains from Tibet to India. It was a trek that tens of thousands of other Tibetans have taken since the Dalai Lama fled a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

My parents must have had their reasons to send me here; they must have had the best of intentions. But 18 years later, I still don't know why they did it. They are not political people. They are small farmers who raise barley and a few yak in a rural area not far from Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. I have not seen them since I left.

As a boy, I hardly thought about them. I was in a new country, part of a community-in-exile the Dalai Lama had created in India. I lived in a school with hundreds of other Tibetan refugee children. But as I grew older I began to long for them.

Today, we occasionally talk on the phone, and that has helped keep us together despite the distance. But long silences often fill our conversations. Over the years, our relationship has only grown more complex, more limited.

It is a relationship so many Tibetan refugees understand. These photos, all of Tibetans who have not seen their parents since coming to India, are my attempt to understand the ideas of family, home, belonging and nostalgia. Some of us cling to family artifacts, some cling to old photos. We learn not to cry as our mothers weep on the telephone, fearing we will make them feel even worse.

Across the years, and with so much distance, everything changes. Time heals many wounds, but also works in strange ways.

Tsering Choephel, a Tibetan who left home 23 years ago, said he sometimes dreams of seeing his family again. Often, he mourns the fact that he barely misses them.

"The great tragedy of my life is not being separated from my family, but being separated from the sensibility of missing them, after living without them for decades."

China's Tibet policy: Bold new proposals

Welcome signs that some officials are at last starting to question policies on Tibet

by Xian Wan and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and The Economist

Jun 22nd 2013 

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FEW outside China think the Communist Party’s strategy for Tibet is working. A combination of economic development and political repression was meant to reconcile Tibetans to Chinese rule and wean them off their loyalty to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader. Instead disaffection is still rife, especially among the young. And all across Tibetan areas of China, Tibetans still display the Dalai Lama’s portrait, sometimes openly. Since March 2011 more than 100 Tibetans—especially in Tibetan areas of provinces bordering what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR)—have set themselves on fire. Most have done so in part to call for the Dalai Lama’s homecoming. An overwhelming security presence and the Dalai Lama’s commitment to non-violence mean that the unrest is easily contained. Hence little has suggested that China’s leaders are concerned about the bleak implications for the future: that their rule in Tibet can be maintained only by the indefinite deployment of massive coercive force.
So for a Chinese scholar, Jin Wei, who is director of ethnic and religious studies at the Central Party School in Beijing, to call for a “creative” new approach is startling. For her to do so publicly, in an interview this month with a Hong Kong magazine, Asia Weekly, suggests that she has high-level backing. A report from a Beijing think-tank in 2009 challenged the official line that rioting in Tibet the year before was instigated from abroad. But Robert Barnett, a professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York, describes Ms Jin’s intervention as a sign that, after two decades, “debate has re-emerged within China about the government’s hard-line policies in Tibet”. Ms Jin even accused former party chiefs in Tibet of being “biased against the practice of religious affairs”. This, she said, “foreshadowed the accumulation of grievances today.”

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• Bold new proposals
• Grid locked

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One former party secretary in Tibet (from 1988-92) was Hu Jintao, who went on to head the party nationally for ten years until last November, when he gave way to Xi Jinping. Those who have forecast that Mr Xi might prove a bolder reformer than the cautious Mr Hu have so far seen little to back them up. Here, on Tibet, is at least a hint of a crack in the hardline consensus. Some have detected another in the appointment of Yu Zhengsheng to head the party’s main policy group on Tibet and Xinjiang, a Muslim-majority region in the north-west. Mr Yu is the head of an advisory body designed to promote national unity. Previous heads of the group have been security specialists.

This is new

Ms Jin’s analysis, though couched in the terminology of party orthodoxy, is similar to that of many foreign observers. She argues that, by demonising the Dalai Lama, and viewing any expression of Tibetan culture as potentially subversive, the party has turned even those Tibetans sympathetic to its aims against it. The struggle has evolved from “a contradiction between the central government and the Dalai Lama separatist clique into an ethnic conflict between Han Chinese and Tibetans”.
She is not advocating a new soft approach to “political” issues, such as the Dalai Lama’s call for greater autonomy for Tibet and Tibetans’ hankering after a “greater Tibet”—ie, within its historic borders, beyond the TAR. But in fact, most protests in Tibet are not about “politics”, defined like this. Many have been sparked by anger at Chinese repression—of Tibetan culture, language and tradition, or of individual protesters. It is a vicious circle, made worse by anger at the large-scale immigration into Tibet of Han Chinese.
Ms Jin has ideas on how to break the impasse. Talks with the Dalai Lama’s representatives, stalled since the most recent of nine fruitless rounds in 2010, should resume, she says. They should concentrate on “easy” issues first, setting contentious debate about Tibet’s status to one side for now. China should consider inviting the Dalai Lama to visit one of its semi-autonomous cities, Hong Kong or Macau, and eventually allowing him back to Tibet. It should also try to defuse the crisis his death will bring by agreeing with him on a chosen reincarnation from inside China’s borders. Otherwise, China risks having to deal with two incarnations: one it endorses and one in exile who is more likely to be revered by most Tibetans.
One of the many obstacles to Ms Jin’s unlikely vision is the identity of China’s negotiating partner. China will only talk to the Dalai Lama’s representative. But two years ago the Dalai Lama retired from his “political” role, ceding it to an elected “prime minister” of the exiles’ government, Lobsang Sangay. Mr Sangay has not done a good job of uniting the exiles and winning their trust. In any event China will not even contemplate talking to him. The Dalai Lama may need, in one respect at least, to come out of retirement.
The debate Ms Jin’s comments have provoked will not bring any immediate relief to Tibetans in Tibet. The infrastructure of Chinese repression is being enhanced and refined, with the implementation of a new “grid” system of street-level surveillance (see article). Dissenters are still locked up every week.
Moreover Ms Jin’s is still a lone voice, at least in public. Few others seem to realise that a new approach in Tibet is in China’s interest. Not only would it ease tension in Tibet; it would help relations with other minorities in China, make reunification with Taiwan more likely and improve China’s relations with the outside world. The more conventional Chinese view is the one voiced recently by a scholar at a Beijing think-tank: “The old Dalai will die soon. End of problem.” Though the Dalai Lama seems in good health, he turns 78 next month. The hope is that Ms Jin will not be the only Chinese adviser to understand that the dying in exile of this Dalai Lama would not be the end of China’s difficulties in Tibet. Rather, his death risks an explosion of violence and the rekindling of a Tibetan independence movement that is for now kept in check by the Dalai Lama’s search for a “middle way”.

Toward the light?

Tibet, China and America

Jul 19th 2011, 14:31

by Xian Wan and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and The Economist

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ON THE topic of Tibet, Xi Jinping, the man widely expected to be the next leader of the Chinese Communist Party, sounds much like his predecessors. Speaking on July 19th in the capital, Lhasa, in front of the Potala Palace, former residence of the Dalai Lamas, Tibet’s spiritual leaders, he celebrated the way Chinese rule had led Tibet “from the dark toward the light”.

In material terms, he has an obvious point. Tibet is far better-off than in 1951, when a young Dalai Lama reached a “17-point agreement” ceding Chinese sovereignty over the territory. He also has a point that, before 1951, Tibet was not some idyllic Shangri-La of tinkling temple bells, lowing conch shells and smiling people, but a highly stratified society relying on mass monasticism and serfdom.

The difficulty Mr Xi and his predecessors face, however, is that large numbers of Tibetans resent Chinese rule. Many are still loyal to the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile with some 80,000 of his followers after the crushing of an anti-Chinese uprising in 1959. Since then the region has been scarred by periodic riots, including a bloody outburst of anti-Chinese violence in Lhasa in 2008.

This year has seen a confrontation at the Kirti monastery in a part of historic Tibet now incorporated in the Chinese province of Sichuan, after a young monk burnt himself to death in March. Hundreds of monks have been taken off for “patriotic education”. This year has also seen a heavy security crackdown to prevent any unrest to mark the 60th anniversary of the 17-point agreement, or the Party’s 90th birthday on July 1st.

China, in public at least, blames the Dalai Lama for the continued Tibetan disaffection. So its spokesmen fume when he is received by foreign leaders, especially America’s. On July 16th Barack Obama met the Dalai Lama in the White House. After the meeting, the White House emphasised that, besides underlining America’s support for Tibetans’ cultural identity and human rights, Mr Obama also repeated America’s acceptance of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.

Nevertheless, the People’s Daily called the meeting “an unscrupulous trick of pragmatism” that undermined the United States’ position as a great world power. Mr Obama has partly himself to blame for the accusation of pragmatism. In 2009 he postponed a meeting with the Dalai Lama in order not to sour the atmosphere for his trip to China a few months later—in effect conceding that such meetings are not matters of pure principle.

So America will hope that China’s formulaic protests are sheer bluster. Almost all American presidents meet the Dalai Lama, though they often agonise about the precise logistics and status of the meeting. And now, in formal terms at least, the Dalai Lama has no political role. This year he renounced it, devolving it to a “prime minister” elected by Tibetans in exile.

After all, America and China have much else to worry about at the moment—notably the possibility of an American sovereign-debt default, forthcoming talks on regional security and a brief forthcoming visit by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to China next week. So both sides have an interest in letting the latest row over Tibet fade from the memory.

So long as he is around, the Dalai Lama will remain the rallying-point for Tibetans opposed to Chinese rule. Yet he also remains committed to a negotiated solution—one, in fact, that would closely resemble the “one-country, two-system” model envisaged in the 17-point agreement.

So it is, for China, a peculiar document to commemorate. In it, China promised not to alter “the existing political system in Tibet”. In 1951 the political system was a feudal theocracy. Now, Tibetans in exile enjoy the forms of parliamentary democracy, though the exile government enjoys no international recognition whatever.

Mr Xi’s problem is that Tibetans in China chafe at autocratic Chinese rule. It is convenient to blame this on the Dalai Lama. But he probably remains the last and only hope for a settlement offering some Tibetan acquiescence in Chinese rule. Mr Xi, like most Chinese Communist leaders who have gone before him, promises the Party will “completely smash any plot to destroy stability”, and seems to prefer the only alternative to consensual rule—continued repression.

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