In response to recent news that some Chinese agencies have stopped issuing travel papers for visitors to Taiwan due to “technical problems,” Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) yesterday said that the number of Chinese visitors has not declined as a whole.
It was reported by local media earlier this week that in some parts of China, such as Henan Province and Fujian Province, government agencies responsible for issuing travel papers for Chinese people to visit Taiwan have stopped doing so on the pretext of “having a shortage of blank travel papers” or “being in the middle of an upgrade to the system issuing travel papers to Taiwan.”
According to a Central News Agency report, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson An Fengshan (安峰山) on Tuesday said that the travel papers’ application, reviewing and issuing procedures all remained normal, and that the “insufficiency of blank papers” was simply due to “some glitches” in the printing process.
Since it has been rumored in the tourism industry that China would slash the number of Chinese visitors by one-third after March 20, Sun yesterday said that the timing of the so-called technical problems was curious and that the Mainland Affairs Council, the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Tourism Bureau would all step up efforts to communicate with China.
However, Sun added that the number of Chinese visitors has actually increased slightly, at least up to the middle of this month.
“Only their composition has altered a bit, with the number of those traveling as free independent travelers having increased, while the number coming with tour groups has gone down,” Sun said.
“In terms of medium and long-term policy goals, [the government] has also been working on attracting tourists [from other countries] and other adjustments, such as foreign exchange rates, which would involve effort [from more departments],” Sun said.
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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