Visa Trouble Deepens

It is becoming clear that the tightening on entry visas by the Chinese authorities has been much wider than previously suspected. Austin is writing a story on the issue that will be out soon on the time.com website, but the point was forcefully brought home to me a couple of days ago when I was chatting with a senior person in the hospitality industry, who obviously didn’t want their name mentioned. The situation is much worse than most people suspect, I was told, with hotel occupancy rates plummeting even among the supposedly bulletproof five star hostelries. Checks with a series of top hotels had them reporting rates well below 50 per cent and in one case in the twenties, an astonishing figure given we only have a little over a month to go before you-know-what. That’s what rates were at during the SARS crisis. At which point you have to start wondering just what the authorities are afraid of to be tightening up to such a degree. I can only suspect they must have had some pretty good intelligence warning of outside threats to the Games. Even the usual bureaucratic caution we see in Beijing ahead of big events such as Party Congresses doesn’t explain this level of worry.