A travel agency catering specifically to Chinese tourists ceased operations last week. With the number of Chinese visitors to Taiwan expected to keep falling, other businesses are likely to follow. The situation has prompted travel, hotel and tour bus operators to plan a protest for Sept. 12 to ask the government to come up with a solution for the shrinking number of Chinese tourists.
This is quite odd. The number of Chinese tourists is declining not because Taiwan is barring their entry, so why protest against the government? Everyone knows the problem is that Beijing is cutting the number of tour groups it allows to visit Taiwan. If people want to protest, they should go to Beijing.
If President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) follows in the footsteps of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and kowtows to the so-called “1992 consensus,” Beijing might relent and reverse its policy on travel to Taiwan. However, people voted to kick out the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which promoted the “1992 consensus,” so even if Tsai were willing to accept it, the question is whether the 6.89 million people who voted for her would agree just because a few tour operators closed shop.
China is using tourist travel to Taiwan as part of its “united front” strategy and the “peace dividend” that Beijing used to co-opt the Ma administration. From a political perspective, this allows the Chinese government to decide when, how, and how many Chinese tourists should be allowed to travel abroad, as well as when and how it will withdraw these “travel benefits” to put pressure on a country and achieve its political goals.
Economically speaking, it allows Chinese travel agencies to control how tours are distributed, thus creating a buyers’ market, where they can push down tour service prices and even appoint tour operators, hotels, tour bus operators and shopping centers, creating what the Chinese call a “one dragon” business model that maximizes profits for China.
Socially speaking, this business model gives Beijing control over Chinese tourists, making sure that they have as little contact with local societies as possible so they would not be “polluted” by the country they visit.
Chinese tourism does more harm than good, as its large, authoritarian economy uses market mechanisms to wheedle its way into a smaller, democratic society. It begins with what at first seems to be a mutual, voluntary business transaction, but then changes into dependence, so the cost of Taiwan pulling out of the relationship continually increases. This makes it difficult to reverse the process, as individual and short-term benefits turn into a collective and long-term disadvantage.
Business investment is always risky, so as firms welcomed the explosion in Chinese tourism, expanded hotels and bought new tour buses, it raises the question whether they considered what would happen if Beijing changed its mind.
Beijing holds all the chips, so it does not care. A businessperson who does not even possess this level of risk awareness and demands that the government take responsibility when things go awry is naive.
Furthermore, according to the Tourism Bureau, while the number of Chinese tourists who visited Taiwan last month shrank 15.03 percent from a year earlier, the overall number of foreign tourists grew 1.88 percent. It is obvious that this is the result of companies choosing their customers.
The number of Chinese tourists is falling, but while the government will try to find ways to deal with that, it cannot guarantee that everyone in the tourism industry will turn a profit. There is no use taking to the streets: These operators will have to solve their problems on their own.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs