President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said a recent decrease in the number of tourists from China is a political matter.
Ma told a delegation from the Monte Jade Science and Technology Association that foreign visitor arrivals to Taiwan reached 10.43 million last year, more than triple the 3.71 million per year average before he assumed office in 2008.
The Tourism Bureau has attributed the significant growth in tourist arrivals to cross-strait peace and liberalization during his term, Ma said.
Ma said that when he met with Kaohsiung residents on Sunday, they expressed concern about the falling number of visitor arrivals, a trend that he said is likely to get worse.
“Everyone knows that this is not a business issue, but rather a political one,” Ma said.
Since president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) won the presidential election on Jan. 16, there have been reports of China sending fewer tourists to Taiwan as a type of “political boycott” of the incoming Democratic Progressive Party administration that is to be sworn in on May 20.
Chinese travel agents told their Taiwanese counterparts that the number of Chinese visitors to Taiwan would drop 30 percent in the three-month period between March 20 and June 30, according to a statement in January by the Travel Agent Association of the Republic of China, Taiwan.
Bureau data showed that in the two-week period from March 23 to April 5, the number of applications for Chinese tour groups to visit Taiwan fell 30 percent, while independent traveler applications dropped about 15 percent.
Last year, more than 4 million Chinese tourists visited Taiwan, a number that was almost evenly split between independent travelers and those in tour groups, bureau data showed.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening 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) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS