AFP / Valery Hache 
 
 Employees of Chinese company Tiens attend a parade on May 8, 2015 in Nice, France, organized by the company's CEO Li Jinyuan 
 
 The biggest-ever tour group to visit France, 6,400 mainly Chinese visitors invited by their company boss, received a VIP welcome Saturday in the southern resort town of Nice. 
 
 In the morning the luxury department store Galeries Lafayette closed its doors to all other shoppers so that the visitors could browse the aisles, and queue at the till, in relative peace. 
 
 Later, the group, 5,400 of whom arrived in France from China on Tuesday aboard 84 commercial planes, filled up the Palais Nikaia to watch the Moulin Rouge cabaret show. 
 
 They are all employees of the Chinese conglomerate Tiens, which is celebrating its 20th birthday. 
 
 Christian Mantel, head of the French tourism development agency Atout France said the authorities were pulling out all the stops to accommodate the wishes of the group, who are paying 13 million euros ($14.5 million) for the 5-13 May visit. 
 
 "And that's without counting the shopping," added Mantel. 
 
 With an average of 1,500 euros in purchases, Chinese tourists are among the world's biggest holiday spenders. 
 
 The Tiens directors have relaxed in the most luxurious hotel rooms. Less elevated employees have been treated to three- or four-star accommodation. 
 
 afp.com / Image Trans / 
 
 This photo from Image Trans shows Tiens employees arranging themselves in the phrase "Tiens' dream is Nice in the Cote d'Azur" in Nice, France, on May 8, 2015 
 
 In the capital Paris, the group had the famous Louvre museum to themselves for a private visit on May 6 before heading south to Nice. 
 
 "We have mobilised public services as well as tourism professionals, hotels, restaurants, shops and designer brands," said Mantel. 
 
 "So far everything has gone smoothly, the feedback has been extremely positive." 
 
 The whole adventure began back in December when Atout France got wind that the Tiens boss group Li Jinyuan wanted to celebrate in style the 20th birthday of his company which operates in tourism, trade and cosmetics among other sectors. 
 
 Mantel said French authorities worked hard to narrow down his destination short-list, which had originally also included London and Rome. 
 
 Along with the Chinese visitors, there were also Russians and Kenyans in the Tiens tour group. 
 
 While in Nice, the group entered the Guinness World Records book after forming the longest ever "human phrase," positioning themselves in groups that read "Tiens' dream is Nice in the Cote d'Azur" in letters visible from the air. 
 
 AFP / Valery Hache 
 
 CEO of Tiens Li Jinyuan (C) waves to his employees on May 8, 2015 in Nice, France 
 
 Tiens CEO Li Jinyuan even took part in a parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. 
 
 Standing in an American jeep he smiled and saluted towards his massed co-workers in the crowd. 
 
 While the group have been getting the VIP treatment, the Tiens top dogs have gone one better with the VVIP treatment lavished on them. 
 
 On Wednesday they met up with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. 
 
 Fabius, who hopes France will welcome 100 million tourists this year, is well aware that "the reservoir for tourists is mainly in the Far East, particularly in China," a member of his team said. ||||| A Chinese boss has taken 6,400 of his staff on a four-day holiday to France that finished with a world-record breaking human chain in the Cote d’Azur. 
 
 Tiens Group Company chairman Li Jinyuan, 57, who is featured on the Forbes list of billionaires, booked 4,760 rooms in 79 four- and five-star hotels in Cannes and Monaco, in addition to 146 buses, for his employees, News.com.au reported. 
 
 After some sightseeing, the employees arranged themselves on the Promenade des Anglais in the southern resort town of Nice to spell out the phrase “Tiens’ dream is Nice in the Cote d’Azur.” Guinness World Records inspectors declared that the visitors from China had created the longest human-made phrase visible from the sky. 
 
 The mass trip to France, and the stunt in Nice were organised to mark 20 years of the Tiens Group, which operates in diverse sectors from biotechnology to tourism. ||||| Sign up and get access to special features Connect to your Facebook or Twitter account and we'll fill in your registration information. 
 
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 ||||| You don’t build one of China’s biggest multi-level marketing companies -- with an army of people peddling herbal toothpastes, “aura energy stones” and bio-fiber beverages door-to-door -- without a knack for, well, marketing. 
 
 So when Tiens Group founder and Chairman Li Jinyuan decided to take 6,400 of his top distributors on an all-expenses-paid trip to France last week to mark the company’s 20th anniversary, the billionaire undoubtedly knew it would generate a wave of publicity to help offset the $14.5 million he shelled out for chartered jets, 30,000 hotel stays and a private tour of the Louvre. 
 
 The throng of worker bees in matching turquoise-and-white hats made headlines around the world as they ventured from Paris to Nice taking in a Moulin Rouge show, spectating at a World War II commemorative parade that featured Li riding in an American jeep, and even getting together to set a Guinness world record. (Their feat? Massing marching-band style on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice to spell out the words “Tiens’ dream is Nice in the Cote d’Azur,” in what Guinness declared the "longest human-made phrase.") 
 
 French tourism authorities said the group was the biggest ever to visit the country, and warmly welcomed what they described as an economic windfall. (Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius even met some “VVIPs” at the Quai d’Orsay.) But back home in China, many people were deriding the spectacle as a crass publicity stunt that would be another blotch on the already blemished reputation of Chinese tourists abroad. 
 
 Reports that some of the travelers drank excessively on their flight to Paris, and that the employees loudly chanted company slogans in Nice added to the cringe factor. 
 
 “What an embarrassment,” the chief executive of mobile phone maker Smartisan, Luo Yonghao, said on his Weibo account. “This is a company that sells healthcare products and got over 6,000 of its sellers to chant slogans for two hours at a beach in France. They even deployed police to maintain order.” (In fairness, photos from the scene showed a very relaxed police presence.) 
 
 Tianyou, a well-known writer, said Li “wanted to live out his dream of being an emperor overseas.” The spectacle, he added, “gives the outside world more evidence of a ‘China threat.’” 
 
 “I don’t know if people in France will hate what he did,” Tianyou added. “If he tried to show off like this in China, would he be arrested?” 
 
 With the number of Chinese taking trips overseas exploding -- they made more than 107 million trips outside the mainland last year, up almost 20% over 2013, according to Chinese authorities -- cities and countries around the world are going out of their way to welcome these new (and sometimes very wealthy) tourists, despite the occasional cultural disconnects on points of etiquette. 
 
 France is the 10th most popular destination for mainland Chinese tourists, receiving 1.9 million last year, said Wolfgang Georg Arlt, director of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute. (Hong Kong is No. 1, while the U.S. ranks seventh, with almost 2.4 million, though visits to America are likely to rise thanks to recent changes that allow Chinese to receive a 10-year, multiple-entry U.S. visa.) 
 
 “We definitely scored points in China ... the echoes are extremely positive,” Christian Mantei, director-general of Atout France, the tourism development agency, told France’s Nice-Matin newspaper. 
 
 Although Mantei predicted that the group members would spend nearly $1,700 each on top of what Li paid for the trip -- Nice’s upscale department store Galeries Lafayette was booked for their private shopping pleasure on Saturday morning -- local Chinese-speaking salesclerks had doubts about the demographics. 
 
 One commented on Weibo that the shoppers were largely unsophisticated middle-aged women and senior citizens who were afraid to even look at the price tags. 
 
 With more Chinese going abroad, their nation has become deeply self-conscious about the image its travelers leave behind. 
 
 Large posters at Beijing’s airport remind outbound tourists that they are ambassadors for their country and that their behavior reflects on the entire nation. The National Tourism Administration has published a 64-page guide to being a “civilized” tourist. (Tips: don’t pick your nose, eat loudly, or steal airplane life jackets; do avoid gambling and pornographic activities.) 
 
 Authorities have even gone so far as to create a “blacklist” of badly behaved tourists, this spring naming and shaming four offenders, including two people who threatened to bomb a plane bound from Thailand to Nanjing in December and threw hot water on a flight attendant; the pilot was forced to turn the plane around. Another man made the list for opening a plane door in mid-flight. 
 
 Though their behavior may have endangered lives, those three offenders were put on the list for just two years. A young man who climbed on top of a state of a Red Army soldier to pose for a photo was giving a 10-year listing. Authorities said the roster would be circulated to tour agencies and customs officials. 
 
 No one in the Tiens group has been accused of any blacklist-worthy offenses, but its sheer size alone may be judged by some people to be disruptive. (In addition to about 5,500 Chinese sellers, the group included about 900 others from countries including Russia, Kenya and Peru. 
 
 Tiens is hardly the only multi-level marketing company to stage such mass vacations. In 2010, Michigan-based Amway paid $80 million to treat 13,000 of its top Chinese sellers to a week in Southern California, but their visits were staggered over five weeks. 
 
 Last May, a 7,000-strong tour group from the direct-marketing company Perfect China visited San Diego, Los Angeles and other Southern California cities, ending their visit with a rally at the Anaheim Convention Center, where they sang the Chinese national anthem and raised the country’s red-and-yellow flag. 
 
 Pan Yiqing, China representative of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, a consulting group, said such massive tour groups are still extremely rare and that very few ordinary Chinese companies treat employees to lavish vacations. Chinese tourists, she said, are increasingly opting to travel independently rather than in large troupes. 
 
 Nevertheless, she acknowledged that the publicity impact of the Tiens outing was huge. “It’s in every newspaper in China,” she said. “I had never even heard of this company before today.” 
 
 In an commentary, China’s state-run Global Times tabloid urged Chinese critics to lighten up. 
 
 “It isn’t worth making the Tiens Paris trip into a headache for Chinese society, debating whether it’s good or bad,” said the newspaper's editorial board. “The two sides [the company and France’s tourism industry] have both gotten what they wanted; it would be more desirable if the carpers in China would adopt that attitude.” ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| Photo 
 
 They filled the streets of Paris and the beaches of the Côte d’Azur. Clad in blue T-shirts and waving flags, they descended on the Louvre en masse. On the sand in Nice, they broke a world record for the longest human-formed sentence visible from the sky. 
 
 The 6,400 workers for a China-based Amway-style multinational conglomerate, the Tiens Group, were enjoying a four-day trip to France and Monaco last week courtesy of their multibillionaire boss, who booked 84 airplanes, more than 200 entire hotels and dozens of trains on a vacation to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary. 
 
 The trip was an economic bonanza for the French tourism industry, said Thomas Deschamps, the head of research at the Paris Tourism Office, who called it an “industrial-size event.” He estimated that the Tiens Group and the tourists had spent $13.5 million on hotel rooms, transportation, meals and shopping for luxury items. About three-quarters of those who work for the company made the trip. 
 
 “It is clear that visits such as these are good for France,” Mr. Deschamps said. “It shows that Paris has the know-how to host big business conferences, even as it was a challenge to receive and host them all at the same time.” 
 
 The arrival of the small army of tourists was particularly welcome following recent reports of brazen robberies of Chinese tourists in the French capital, which have fanned concerns in the French tourism industry that they might skip Paris in favor of other destinations. 
 
 But in China, the trip was an embarrassment to some, who saw in the spectacle a sales ploy, even a Maoist-style political campaign to achieve a contemporary Chinese goal: making money. 
 
 Calling it “military tourism,” Tao Duanfang, the pen name of Tao Yong, a self-declared Francophile who writes on culture, development and tourism, wrote that the West was being fooled in a guest commentary in The Beijing News, headlined “The World’s Largest Tour Group Wasn’t Just for the Amusement of the French.” 
 
 “This definitely wasn’t just a rest or a holiday, but a ‘work trip’ or a ‘struggle,’ ” he wrote, using a common Chinese political term. 
 
 The Tiens Group, a direct-sales company, says it reaches consumers in 190 countries and deals mostly in health food, health care appliances, skin care and household products. At a meeting in Nice with French officials, however, company executives said they were interested in expanding into French wine, restaurants, perfume, fashion and art, according to a report by Xinhua, the state-run news agency. The company says it also owns a university and a health research center in China. 
 
 Tiens has been accused of playing on dreams of riches, and at least one account, from Uganda, on the Think Africa Press website, said it promotes dubious remedies for serious illnesses. 
 
 After leaving Paris, thousands from China and other countries where the conglomerate is active, like Indonesia, formed a giant sentence on the beach in Nice: “Tiens’ Dream Is Nice in the Côte d’Azur.” Their effort earned a Guinness world record for the longest human-formed phrase visible from the sky. 
 
 Photo 
 
 A picture with an article in The Independent of Britain showed Li Jinyuan, 57, the company’s founder, standing in an open-top, military-style jeep. Mr. Li is worth about $5.8 billion, according to the Hurun Report, which publishes a list of the richest people in China. The company’s worth could not immediately be confirmed from its website. 
 
 Contacted by telephone, an employee in Beijing, who declined to give his name because he was not authorized to speak with the news media, said sales representatives obtained products from the headquarters, or local branches. They sell them personally or at stores they open themselves, he said, estimating that there are 5,000 such stores in China alone. Representatives have no base salary but earn a commission. “The more we sell, the higher the commission,” he said. 
 
 Photos and videos of the smiling Chinese employees circulated widely on social media: 
 
 Smart move by Tiens Group RT @BBCWorld Chinese firm sends 6,400 employees on French holiday //t.co/8HlwWJRJVC //t.co/VSfkjUsZfp — Gordon Vaughan (@aeroG) 10 May 15 
 
 Now THAT’S a nice boss! #China’s Tiens Group CEO takes 6,400 staff on holiday to #France 
 
 //t.co/ngMqYqYoQM — China Australia (@china_australia) 11 May 15 
 
 Didi Kirsten Tatlow reported from Beijing, and Dan Bilefsky from London. Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, and Vanessa Piao contributed research from Beijing. 
 

– Imagine your boss said he'd treat you—and several thousand of your colleagues—to an all-expenses-paid vacation in France, complete with a private trip to the Louvre and luxury shopping—and that you'd also break a world record. That's exactly what happened for 6,400 or so employees of China's Tiens Group when CEO Li Jinyuan took on holiday the largest tour group France has ever seen, AFP reports. The trip to Paris and Nice this month was organized to celebrate the company's 20th anniversary and is said to have run Li between $14.5 million and $22.3 million, per the AP. After a couple of days in the City of Light, the Tiens tourists headed down to the Côte d'Azur, where they pulled off another incredible feat: forming a human chain visible from the sky that spelled out "Tiens' dream is Nice in the Côte d'Azur," reportedly deemed to be a Guinness World Record by officials, the Hindustan Times notes. Chinese visitors keep the tourism mill running worldwide: They made more than 107 million trips outside of China last year, a 20% spike from 2013, the Los Angeles Times notes. As for this over-the-top junket, though, Li, who's appeared on the Forbes' billionaires' list, has been accused of running an Amway-like business that hawks questionable items such as "anti-cancerization" sanitary napkins and other products said to do everything from reverse impotence to make hernias, tumors, and appendicitis "disappear." The New York Times' Sinosphere blog points out some are calling Li's stunt "military tourism" designed as just another moneymaking "sales ploy," while other prominent Chinese citizens told the LA Times Li's trip was "an embarrassment" and a way for him to "live out his dream of being an emperor overseas."