Travel agencies said yesterday they were worried that allowing Chinese citizens to tour Taiwan individually might undermine national security and social order.
Johnson Tseng (曾盛海), chairman of the Republic of China Travel Agency Association, said the government's decision to abolish the requirement that Chinese must arrive and leave in groups is generally welcomed as a "positive and constructive policy."
The government allows Chinese citizens to visit Taiwan only if they live outside China.
Tseng said Taiwan's travel agencies do not think that the government should allow Chinese tourists to make their own travel arrangements.
More precisely, he claimed that it would be "dangerous" for Taiwan to allow Chinese citizens to buy air tickets and make hotel reservations by themselves without paying a Taiwanese travel agency to do it for them.
According to Tseng, it would be hard for the government to monitor the activities of Chinese tourists if they were not traveling in a tour group. Chinese tourists can also visit more attractions than those traveling alone, he added.
Tseng made the remarks after the Executive Yuan decided on Monday to abolish the requirement that Chinese tourists must arrive and leave Taiwan in groups.
The government plans to attract 3.2 million foreign visitors -- including 200,000 Chinese -- this year.
About 170,000 overseas Chinese visited Taiwan in 2002 for sightseeing, but the number plunged to 130,000 last year, mainly because of SARS.
Members of the association are also looking forward to an across-the-board relaxation of restrictions on Chinese citizens traveling to Taiwan, including allowing those who live in China to visit, Tseng said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained