Before the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) re-took power, it confidently said: “We’re ready!” But the achievements of the party’s first month in office show this was far from true. The government also said it was ready to deliver President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) first major election promise: allowing Chinese tourists to come to Taiwan. However, even KMT Central Standing Committee member Sean Lien (連勝文) said the nation’s airports are old and neglected, and that he worried Chinese tourists arriving at Taipei’s Songshan Airport would feel like they had landed in Pyongyang instead.
Harsh words, but Songshan is in a bad state. As Minister of Transportation and Communication Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) said, this is the result of years of neglect. The Democratic Progressive Party administration not only opposed making Songshan the hub for direct cross-strait flights, it wanted to move the airport and turn the site into a park. So it wasn’t interested in investing in the airport.
While neighboring countries like Singapore have expanded their airports or built new ones like Hong Kong International Airport or Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, it is disheartening to see buildings at Taoyuan International Airport and Taipei Songshan Airport with ceiling stains from water leaks, broken windows, outdated customs clearance facilities and other problems. Even Chinese airlines representatives visiting Taiwan think there is room for improvement. With Taoyuan and Songshan airports in such a state of disrepair, imagine what other airports in the country look like.
People in the tourism industry can’t wait to get started in the cross-strait business: they are busy printing explanations in simplified Chinese, retraining their staff, studying the differences between Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin and memorizing the exchange rate between the Chinese Yuan and the New Taiwan dollar. They are sparing no effort to make sure they are ready to welcome Chinese tourists.
But when a tourist’s first impression is a dilapidated airport, Taiwan’s reputation as a “beautiful island” could easily be destroyed. The government needs to increase efforts to renovate the airports, so that facilities are up-to-date and their standards of efficiency, safety, comfort and convenience are up to scratch.
It is also important to implement security and health checks for the expected influx. Undoubtedly, Chinese tourists will be a mixed bag. Most will be ordinary tourists, but a handful of smugglers, illegal immigrants and spies will also enter the country. If customs and immigration authorities are incapable of preventing this from happening by rapidly and efficiently monitoring suspicious individuals, it will take twice the effort to deal with the problem after unsavory individuals have entered the country.
There is also a great discrepancy in the quality of medical services on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Once a large number of Chinese tourists enter Taiwan, the protective screen for epidemics will disappear. The question is whether the Ministry of Health can work out an effective quarantine mechanism to prevent public heath disasters such as SARS from happening again.
Airport infrastructure is linked to national image. Although the airports cannot be repaired overnight, the government needs to show a determination to improve the nation’s tourism infrastructure.
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics
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