President Stubb invites more Chinese tourists to visit Finland

Finnish President Alexander Stubb has welcomed more Chinese tourists to visit the country to enjoy its beautiful natural sceneries and explore its cities which he said are "easy to deal with" due to their compact size.

In an exclusive interview with China Media Group(CMG) on Wednesday, President Stubb expressed his hope for closer friendly communications between the people of the two countries. He was in Beijing for a four-day state visit to China from Oct 28 to 31 at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"I, of course hope that we'll have a lot of visitors from China coming to Finland and then vice versa. That's always a good sort of start because I feel that when there are so-called high-level visits, ministers or otherwise, then always something happens. So here, for instance, we had a little bit over ten memorandums of understanding, state to state, so China, Finland. And then we had a little bit less than 20 business to business type of agreements," said Stubb.

Finland is located in northern Europe, bordering Sweden, Norway, and Russia. One-third of Finland's territory lies within the Arctic Circle, where the Northern Lights are world-famous. The country is also known as "the land of a thousand lakes."

"Finland is a lot about nature and it's a very clean country. There are basically three destinations of tourism that I would look at. One is the lake district, we have over 100,000 lakes. One is the archipelago. We have over 100,000 islands. And then one is Lapland. So that's the nature side. Then of course cities, which, our cities are quite compact, easy to deal with. So it should be a fairly easy place to travel," said Stubb.

This year marks the 74th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Finland. Finland was one of the earliest Western countries to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the first Western country to sign a governmental trade agreement with China.

Today, China has been Finland's largest trading partner in Asia for several consecutive years, while Finland is China's third largest trading partner in the Nordic region.

Heavy fog continued to shroud China's capital city of Beijing on Saturday morning and visibility was reduced to less than one kilometer, with some areas even being below 40 meters.

The Beijing Meteorological Observatory continued a yellow alert for heavy fog at 06:00 on Saturday morning.

Affected by the dense fog, Beijing Capital International Airport is scheduled for 1,218 flight departures and arrivals, and will handle 194,400 passenger trips on the day.

Meanwhile, Beijing Daxing International Airport also experienced heavy fog. The airport initiated relevant procedures and is fully committed to ensuring flight operations and passenger services.

Due to the thick fog, 22 sections of expressways in Beijing and Hebei, as well as 457 toll stations in Shaanxi, Tianjin, Shanxi, Shandong, Heilongjiang and Jilin had been closed by 09:00.