Lijiang in Yunnan Province
© andreaqi

If you happen to be HIV positive and you've always wanted to visit China, good news: the Chinese government has lifted its twenty-year-old ban on foreigners with AIDS, HIV, or other sexually transmitted diseases entering the country, according to CNN. So you can now get a tourist visa.

The ban on travel over the last two decades has been based largely on the idea that foreigners would spread HIV in China. But the Chinese government has accepted the fact that HIV is now endemic in parts of China and decided that foreigners play little role in spreading HIV and STDs.

The Chinese news agency Xinhua puts the number of people with HIV at about 740,000 back in October 2009. Almost 50,000 deaths had been attributed to AIDS at that point. China's first AIDS case was in 1985. HIV is most common in Yunnan, Henan, and Xinjiang provinces.