China and Taiwan have added tourism to their bones of contention since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) swept to power in the Jan. 16 elections, trading accusations about who is to blame for a decline in Chinese visitors to Taiwan.
China has made no secret of its dislike for incoming president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who takes office on Friday, and for her DPP.
Since the polls, the Republic of China has accused Beijing of effectively kidnapping its citizens from Kenya on suspicion of involvement in a telecoms fraud, and reacted angrily to China casting doubt on its observer status at the WHO.
Now the Chinese tourists who visit Taiwan — 4.2 million last year — have become the focus of discord.
The number fell 10 percent month-on-month to 363,878 in March, according to the Tourism Bureau.
That is still up on a year ago, but those who service the visitors, including the bus companies that shuttle tour groups around, said they are feeling the pinch.
“Chinese tourists took about 4,000 tour buses a month this time around last year, but now it’s only 2,800,” National Joint Association of Tourist Buses head Alex Lu (魯孝亞) said.
“China is using its tourists as a bargaining chip against Taiwan’s new government,” he added.
If Tsai’s inauguration speech upsets Beijing, many fear China could really turn the screws on tourist numbers.
“This kind of political interference would only result in hurt feelings for people on either side of the Taiwan Strait,” Executive Yuan spokesman-designate Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) said.
The travel industry is nervous.
“Everyone is waiting to see how China will react to the inauguration speech,” Eva Airways vice president Golden Kou said.
Two tour agents said they had been told to restrict the numbers they send to Taiwan since the election.
“The [Chinese] National Tourism Administration told us in February and March to cut the number of tourists we send to Taiwan,” an agent in Xiamen said.
“From Xiamen the number of tourists has fallen sharply, down more than 50 percent,” said the agent, who asked to be identified only as Chen (陳).
An agent in Guangdong Province, who gave her family name as Kuang (關), said Chinese were “still fascinated with Taiwan,” but the government had cut the number allowed to visit.
A Beijing source with knowledge of China’s policy on Taiwan tourism said there had been technical problems in some provinces, including Henan, which ran out of application forms for Taiwan tourist permits.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to a request for comment, and the relevant office at the China National Tourism Administration declined to comment.
China’s state media blames Taiwan.
The Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily last week said Taiwan’s fiddling with the quota system was causing the fall in numbers.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater