Chinese authorities have announced that individual visits to Taiwan by some of its citizens will be officially permitted from tomorrow. During the initial trial period, residents of Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen will be able to visit Taiwan on their own.
This development is widely seen as a big chance to profit from exchanges across the Taiwan Strait, but some people take a more negative view, asking whether visitors might overstay, abscond or work illegally. In this regard, Hong Kong’s experience in implementing its Individual Visit Scheme would be a good reference point for understanding the possible benefits and risks.
Allowing Chinese visitors to travel independently is an important step in promoting two-way deregulation of cross-strait travel and creating a spillover effect that will benefit a wider range of businesses. The policy of allowing Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan was implemented three years ago, and Chinese tourists and businesspeople made 1.4 million visits to Taiwan last year.
However, the fact that these visitors have thus far been restricted to arriving and leaving in groups has meant that the benefits have been limited to travel agencies, tourist destinations and a fixed number of hotels and restaurants. These tour groups do all their shopping at outlets that have cooperative arrangements with travel agencies, while other businesses have not benefited.
Allowing Chinese visitors to travel independently will satisfy tourists’ desire to go where they please. It will increase the depth and breadth of tourism in Taiwan by Chinese tourists and expand their consumer spending, so that more small restaurants, cafes, retailers and transport businesses will benefit from the a spillover effect.
Looking at the Hong Kong experience, the Individual Visit Scheme, which was launched in 2003, had by December last year expanded to cover visitors from 49 Chinese cities. By that time, more than 60 million visits had been made to Hong Kong under the scheme, bringing considerable benefits to travel, retail and other businesses.
Be that as it may, quite a lot of disputes have arisen over the past few years involving Chinese travelers in Hong Kong, and there have been arguments and discussions about issues to do with Chinese visiting Hong Kong to shop, buy property, give birth to children and so on. Taiwan would do well to learn from this experience.
Last month, the Hong Kong Research Association conducted a survey of 1,080 people residing in the territory. Although 77 percent of respondents agreed that individual visits by people from other parts of China had had a “very big” or “quite big” effect in stimulating growth in Hong Kong’s retail sector, 46 percent of people surveyed had a worse impression of individual travel by Chinese compared to a year earlier, while only 8 percent had a better impression.
Seventy-two percent of respondents thought that shopping visits by people from other parts of China had “a very big influence” or “quite a big influence” on Hong Kong residents’ everyday shopping experience.
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in the survey thought individual travel by Chinese had had “a very big influence” or “quite a big influence” on their lives. The biggest influence quoted was “prices of goods and services have been driven up,” followed by “tight supply of goods and services” and then “crowded conditions at tourist and shopping spots.”
Will this kind of social contradiction and the gradual tendency toward resentment of outsiders that Hong Kong has experienced also happen in Taiwan? This is something the authorities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should keep an eye on.
People have been arguing about negative aspects such as possible overstays and illegal work. The individual travel scheme, which is being made available to residents of certain Chinese cities in the trial period, will have to be managed in a different way from the existing model under which visitors arrive in and leave Taiwan in groups.
It is expected that an average of 500 individual travelers will arrive from China each day, which adds up to 15,000 arrivals each month. Authorities on both sides of the Strait will be watching to see whether Taiwan’s government has sufficient security measures in place to prevent overstays. If visitors were to overstay, and if this led to major social incidents, it would provoke a negative reaction from Taiwanese, and that could be an unpredictable factor in next January’s elections.
Besides, disputes to do with travel arrangements and shopping that may occur with independent Chinese travelers are an important factor that could affect the impression that these visitors and those from other countries form of Taiwan’s travel environment and quality of service. The experience of Hong Kong’s Travel Industry Council is that it has to handle 70 to 80 complaints about shopping disputes from Chinese visitors each year.
Once independent travelers from China start arriving in Taiwan, it is almost inevitable that there will be disputes about accommodation, itineraries, shopping and so on. To keep such disputes to a minimum, our government needs to deal with the problem of falling service quality at tourist hotspots like Sun Moon Lake (日月潭) and Alishan (阿里山) that attract hordes of visitors. At the same time, our government will have to maintain mechanisms for communication and cooperation with China’s National Travel Administration and other travel departments to properly manage and regulate individual travel by Chinese to prevent overstays.
Finally, the government should move quickly to set up an effective system for handling travelers’ complaints. That means establishing a procedure for handling such complaints, and systems for collecting data, responding to complaints, mediation and so on. That is the only way to effectively handle disputes that might arise with independent Chinese visitors and make improvements that can keep such disputes to a minimum.
Tsai Horng-ming is an associate professor at Taiwan Normal University’s Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Global Strategy and a former adviser to the National Security Council.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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