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Editorial: Chinese tourists blur the focus

The spat this week between the Tourism Bureau and the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) over advertising revenue proves wrong anyone who thought tourism bureaucrats in this country couldn't get any more inept.

The THSRC is refusing to provide the bureau with advertising space at a nominal fee and the bureau has retaliated by turning to the out-of-favor Taiwan Railway Administration to further its policy goals.

This stupidity showers neither organization with glory.

Nevertheless, for those whose conception of tourism does not extend beyond the fleecing of gullible Chinese, the spat may not be so disturbing. The high speed rail does not direct cash into the hands of bus, airplane and resort operators, who are among the most vocal backers of a change in cross-strait policy.

The Chen administration is spending enormous amounts of time and political capital on opening up tourism to a much larger number of Chinese tourists. Notwithstanding the bluster coming from some pan-green-camp politicians, there is little to be concerned about in terms of political or security considerations given how many "China shills" Taiwan produces without Beijing's prodding.

The bigger and more important question is why the tourism industry is so eager to secure the Chinese tourist dollar -- apparently at the expense of the rest of the world's travelers.

The answer is not very pleasant: Taiwan's tourism chiefs and entrepreneurs are lazy and incompetent and have filled the country with substandard facilities and poorly trained, monolingual staff.

Chinese tourists, accustomed to this laziness and incompetence -- and worse -- at home, will pose no problem for travel agencies except in demanding refunds from the most conspicuously shoddy operators.

The fact is that Taiwan has so much to offer to tourists from the rest of the world -- but the message is not getting through. Insufficient cash for overseas promotional work can be blamed, but only to a point.

There are other things that the government can and should do to destroy the absurd assumption that a larger Chinese market is going to make Taiwan more tourist-friendly.

One is to make visas free and extend them to three months (as with Hong Kong) for nationals of countries that pose no direct security threat to Taiwan.

Martial law finished 20 years ago; there are no good reasons to make tourists jump through hoops that simply exist to make Taiwan's overseas officers seem more important than they really are.

Another is that tourism authorities should employ more fluent and competent speakers of English and Japanese to buttress their multilingual resources. The omnipresence of Chinglish in major tourism centers, particularly outside of Taipei City, is acutely embarrassing for the nation. It also inconveniences tourists as they make their way around the country, though, as far as can be made out, no one in government seems to think this is an issue of concern.

Tourism is about more than lining the pockets of individual operators. It's about selling ideas and presenting the nation in a certain way to mobile (and therefore more influential) foreigners. Until such time that the government takes upgrading tourism seriously, the ideas that will be presented to foreign visitors, including Chinese, will have a nasty, provincial flavor.
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