Representatives of the tourism industry in Kaohsiung and Pingtung are scheduled to meet with a top tourism official from China today as part of efforts to attract more Chinese visitors to southern Taiwan.
Lin Fu-nan (林富男), head of the Kao Kao Ping Tourism Alliance, a union of tourism-related industries in the Kaohsiung and Pingtung areas, said the alliance will discuss with Shao Qiwei (邵琪偉), director of China’s National Tourism Administration and head of the Cross-Strait Tourism Association, ways of bringing more Chinese tourists to the area.
Lin said that Kaohsiung City tourism has suffered greatly because of a sharp decrease in the number of Chinese tourist arrivals since a visit last year by the Dalai Lama, who is viewed by China as a separatist.
The Kaohsiung City Government invited the Tibetan spiritual leader to visit last year to pray for victims of Typhoon Morakot after the storm in August caused massive destruction in the south of the country.
Then in September last year, the city government screened a documentary about exiled Uighur political activist Rebiya Kadeer.
Kadeer is also seen by China as a separatist.
Lin said that thanks to the efforts of tourism operators who sought to establish communications with the Chinese authorities, tourist arrivals from China have returned to “normal levels.”
He expressed the hope that “no other government agencies or officials would take similar actions or make remarks” that would be detrimental to tourism or other industries.
“As 45 percent of visitors to Kaohsiung City are Chinese tourists, many tourism operators in the area see Chinese visitor arrivals as a shot in arm for the sector,” Lin said.
The operators have planned new tour packages and are hoping that the meeting with Shao will yield positive results, he added.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
RSS