Taiwan registered a record high of 8.477 million tourist arrivals in the first 10 months of the year, with the biggest increase seen in arrivals from South Korea, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said.
The overall figure for the January to October period represented a rise of 4.67 percent year-on-year, while tourist arrivals from South Korea grew by an annual 23.5 percent, ministry data showed.
Arrivals from Hong Kong and Macao showed the second-largest growth of 7.89 percent, the data showed.
The number of tourist arrivals from South Korea, Hong Kong and Macao and China in the period also hit record-highs of 530,034, 1.231 million and 3.499 million respectively, the ministry said.
The figures are part of a report that Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Chien-yu (陳建宇) is to present to the Legislature’s Transportation Committee today, with the aim of improving the quality of the nation’s tourism products and reducing the sector’s reliance on Chinese visitors.
The ministry said it plans to attract more high-end tourists from Southeast Asia and China by developing a more friendly tourism environment and themed travel packages.
The ministry is also proposing a revision of itineraries for low-end tour groups, which focus on shopping, and implementing tourist traffic control at popular sites such as Taipei’s National Palace Museum and the Alishan National Scenic Area in Nantou.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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