Taiwanese social media since Tuesday have been flooded with the variations of a meme that ends with the phrase “because Chinese tourists are not coming,” after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) attributed the closure of TransAsia Airways to President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) cross-strait policy.
The growing list of mock accusations include gems like: “I have not had a girlfriend in 30 years because Chinese tourists are not coming;” “Eating only one lunch box is not enough for me because Chinese tourists are not coming;” “Sitting on the toilet, but feeling constipated because Chinese tourists are not coming;” and “Donald Trump got elected US president because Chinese tourists are not coming.”
The meme conveys a simple message: that the KMT blaming Tsai’s cross-strait policy and the stalemate across the Taiwan Strait for everything has become preposterous to the point of hilarity.
The KMT said that since Chinese tourists accounted for 40 percent of TransAsia’ passengers, the decline in the number of Chinese visiting Taiwan since Tsai’s May 20 inauguration — by 15 percent in July, 33 percent in August and 38 percent in September compared with the same periods last year — put the final nail on the ailing carrier’s coffin.
However, the KMT seems to have deliberately ignored the company’s record on “flight safety practices, corporate mismanagement and the allocation of its funds,” as Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ding-yu (王定宇) said.
Wang also said that TransAsia served more passengers in the first nine months of this year than it did in the same period last year and in 2014.
The “Chinese tourists” card had been played far too many times by the KMT and several pan-blue news outlets even before Tsai was elected the nation’s first female head of state amid a growing anti-China sentiment in the nation.
They had warned against a wide range of potential consequences of Tsai winning the Jan. 16 presidential election and of what they believed to be an inevitable decline in the number of Chinese tourists.
The number of Chinese visitors to Taiwan has indeed fallen since May 20, but it is not due to any provocation by Tsai or her government. Rather, it is the result of the punitive measures that Beijing has vindictively imposed against the Tsai administration over the latter’s refusal to acknowledge the so-called “1992 consensus.”
Most Taiwanese must have realized by now that the “1992 consensus” is nothing but a sugar coating for Beijing’s “one China” principle. If the KMT is still naive enough to believe that both sides of the Strait are allowed to have “different interpretations” of what the “China” in “one China” means, it should ask former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for his opinion.
Ma was the only participant at the World Chinese Economic Summit in Malaysia on Tuesday last week whose official title was not fully credited. He was referred to as “His Excellency Ma Ying-jeou, World Chinese Leader.” Ma reacted by writing his own name tag that identified him as “former president of the Republic of China (Taiwan).”
The incident has Beijing’s fingerprints all over it and proves that no matter how much goodwill Ma has shown China or how much effort he has made to be on good terms with it, Beijing would still do as it pleases when it comes to asserting sovereignty.
The incident has been listed on a recently reactivated Web site where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs keeps records of Beijing’s attempts to suppress Taipei.
Hopefully the KMT will realize the futility and unworthiness of its blind support for Beijing before it becomes the next item on the list.
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