The government likes to play fast and loose with identity issues, tailoring labels and figures to suit itself and the situation. Although there is nothing new about its efforts at misdirection, President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration should still be called to account for its tactics.
Ma continually reiterates that cross-strait relations are not international relations because “mainland China” is part of the Republic of China’s (ROC) territory. This means, he says, that the “mainland” cannot be recognized as another nation within the ROC’s territory. If that is so, then the government should not be allowed to count Chinese visitors, whether in groups or individuals, as foreigners when it comes to massaging its tourism numbers, since, according to Ma et al, they do not come from a different country.
Nevertheless, the Tourism Bureau this week hailed the release of a UN World Tourism Organization report that said Taiwan had the world’s highest growth in foreign tourist arrivals in the first half of the year.
According to the UN agency’s report, foreign tourist arrivals in Taiwan reached 6.44 million for the first six months of the year, a 26.7 percent increase from the same period last year, just edging out Japan, which saw a 26.4 percent rise.
Those figures are very impressive considering the UN agency’s “World Tourism Barometer” shows international tourist arrivals were up 4.6 percent for the first half of the year.
The agency says Taiwan’s revenue from international tourism in the first half of the year rose 18.5 percent over last year’s, putting it in third place behind Japan and South Korea in the world rankings.
Tourism Bureau Deputy Director-General Liu Wayne (劉喜臨) said the growth rate reflected the nation’s international promotion efforts, especially those aimed at Asian tourists.
That sounds great until one realizes that about 90 percent of those “foreign” visitors to Taiwan were from Asia, with China, Japan and Hong Kong/Macau listed as the top three sources.
The Tourism Bureau’s statistics for last year show Chinese accounted for 35.8 percent of the 8.02 million visitors, while those from Hong Kong and Macau accounted for 14.8 percent. That means that a little more than half (50.6 percent) of last year’s tourists came from China, a figure that is likely to be equaled or exceeded this year.
And China is a lucrative market, since Chinese tourists brought US$3.63 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, the bureau said in August.
However, the government is not the only one playing around with figures. One would like to ask the UN World Tourism Organization how, since it lists Taiwan as a province of China (which has seen a 2 percent drop in foreign tourists in the first half of the year), it can accept Chinese tourist arrivals to Taiwan as foreign tourism.
Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said that given the current tourism data and the government’s promotional efforts, he expects foreign tourist arrivals to top 10 million next year. This is a nice round number, but it would be far less round if Chinese visitors were discounted. The government should not be able to have it both ways.
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