About 44,000 Chinese tourists visited Taiwan last month, down 68 percent from a year earlier, Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said on Thursday, citing figures from the National Immigration Agency.
The decline follows Beijing’s August announcement that it would temporarily stop issuing travel permits for independent travel to Taiwan.
Of the 44,000 Chinese visitors, about 20,000 came with tour groups, while about 24,000 came as independent travelers using permits issued before the restriction came into effect, Chiu said.
Those represented declines of 59 percent and 73 percent respectively, he said.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Hsiao-kuang (馬曉光) on Wednesday blamed the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for the travel restrictions.
“DPP authorities have been constantly agitating for Taiwan independence, provoking hostility against China and poisoning the atmosphere of cross-strait relations,” Ma said in a statement.
Chiu said the government’s position toward China has been consistent and has focused on maintaining the “status quo.”
The unilateral travel restrictions are a violation of independent travel agreements between the two countries, Chiu said.
The council also criticized Chinese proposals to build bridges linking Fujian Province with Kinmen and Matsu, saying the islands’ residents saw the bridge construction as unnecessary, especially if it is predicated on unification.
China “doesn’t just want to build bridges to Kinmen and Matsu, they want to build a bridge to Taiwan,” Chiu said.
Changes to the “status quo” in cross-strait relations are a result of Chinese efforts to push its “one country, two systems” policy, which Chiu described as a “poisoned chalice” to Taiwan.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods