Why are the heads of Taiwan’s central and local governments so fixated on promoting the tourism industry, as if there were no other sectors worth promoting?
After former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was inaugurated on May 20, 2008, he proceeded to lift restrictions on exchanges between Taiwan and China, opening Taiwan’s doors to Chinese tourists. Scenic areas soon filled up with Chinese visitors, as did attractions like Taipei 101.
The mayors and commissioners of Taiwan’s 22 municipalities and counties followed suit by adopting policies and offering incentives designed to attract tourists from China. Since then, almost all heads of local governments have been prioritizing the tourism sector in their policies.
This trend is exemplified by newly recalled Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜). Economic policies proposed during his 2018 election campaign included building a Ferris wheel, a horse racing track and a theme park, developing medical tourism and attracting more visitors to places such as Cijin Island (旗津島) and the Love River (愛河).
Setting aside the question of how far he got with implementing these policies, remarkably more than half of his policy proposals dealt with tourism.
It is similar all over Taiwan. Almost every municipal mayor and county commissioner, including the heads of Tainan, Miaoli, Pingtung, Taichung and Hualien, have made tourism their top concern.
However, things took a turn for the worse at the beginning of the year when COVID-19 spread in Wuhan, China. Although Taiwan has done a good job controlling the virus, places and businesses all over the nation that depend on tourism, including night markets, tour bus operators, travel agents and hotels, have been hit hard by travel restrictions.
COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of the tourism industry by turning it from hero to zero almost overnight.
Taiwan has plenty of dynamic business sectors that have never been similarly favored by government authorities.
Politicians seem to have a very shallow understanding of business and industry. Taiwan’s stock market features businesses in the fields of finance, electronics, chemicals, information, communications, biomedicine, precision machinery, food, aerospace, renewable energy and construction.
Many of those businesses have managed to keep growing even during the COVID-19 pandemic, but none of them have received the attention they deserve. Instead, the central and local governments have not stopped blindly worshiping the tourism sector as their policy achievement savior.
On May 28, China’s National People’s Congress approved a plan to implement national security legislation in Hong Kong. This decision is likely to be a wake-up call for foreign-invested businesses in China to pack up and move to friendlier places.
This is the best opportunity for Taiwan in decades, and central and local governments should think about how to adjust their policies accordingly.
The nation should develop scientific and technological industries that suit the geographical characteristics of each region and build infrastructure to support them. Policy incentives could be offered to attract businesses to those areas, along with human resources, investment and technology.
This is the direction in which politicians and government officials should be thinking.
Joly Lin is vice chairman of Mennonite Christian Hospital and vice president of a company.
Translated by Julian Clegg
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) on Thursday last week urged democratic nations to boycott China’s military parade on Wednesday next week. The parade, a grand display of Beijing’s military hardware, is meant to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. While China has invited world leaders to attend, many have declined. A Kyodo News report on Sunday said that Japan has asked European and Asian leaders who have yet to respond to the invitation to refrain from attending. Tokyo is seeking to prevent Beijing from spreading its distorted interpretation of wartime history, the report
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
RSS