The Taiwan Visitors Association confirmed this week that Chinese tour operators will not attend this year’s Cross-Strait Taipei Travel Fair, which is scheduled to take place in October.
It would be the first time Chinese tour operators skip the fair since it opened in 2006.
The fair was for several years jointly organized by the Taiwan Visitors Association and the Association for Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits, two quasi-official agencies representing Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau and China’s National Tourism Administration.
It was held at the same time as the International Travel Fair (ITF), another annual event organized by the Taiwan Visitors Association. Both were held at the Taipei World Trade Center, but treated as separate fairs.
Over the years, the Cross-Strait Taipei Travel Fair has evolved into a major platform for tourism businesses across the Taiwan Strait to interact with each other and form partnerships.
The Chinese delegation to the fair was to be led by the chief of the Chinese National Travel Administration and to include tourism officials from different cities and provinces in China, who were to meet with Taiwanese tourism officials and travel agencies.
Last year, 600 representatives of travel associations from 28 Chinese cities and provinces attended the fair.
However, Taiwan Visitors Association secretary-general Wu Chao-yen (吳朝彥) said that Chinese tour operators this year would not be exhibiting at the fair.
“We have yet to hear from the Association for Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits whether Chinese tourism operators are able to attend the fair this year. Unfortunately, we need to plan the fair ahead of time and there are many issues to address, so we have no other option but to lease the booths reserved for Chinese tour operators to other domestic and international operators,” Wu said.
Wu said the association has informed local tour operators that they can still submit requests for more booths at the fair, adding that the association would place more detailed information about these booths on its Web site.
The incident should not be considered a sign that cross-strait tourism was in decline, Wu said.
Both sides simply failed to work out certain details during the planning process, Wu said.
The Taiwan Visitors Association would still extend invitations to Chinese operators for next year’s fair, Wu said.
The association added in a statement that it had never stopped contacting and inviting its Chinese partner to have preparatory meetings before the fair.
“However, we did not receive any definite response from them, which forced us to keep postponing our preparatory work. Nevertheless, we still waited for their official reply with patience and sincerity,” it said.
The two associations did manage to hold a first preparatory meeting for the fair last month, following multiple negotiations and correspondences, the statement said.
However, the meeting left both sides with many unsettled issues, it said.
The Taiwan Visitors Association eventually requested that its Chinese counterpart address these issues by Aug. 10 so that it could proceed with the preparatory work, but the result was unsatisfactory.
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
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
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