Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr in a letter to an unnamed US senator on Feb. 9 said that China has offered to “fill every hotel room,” in Palau, “and more if more are built” if the small island nation were to break ties with Taiwan. The letter further claims that China offered US$20 million per year for the creation of a “call center” in Palau, a nation whose economy relies heavily on tourism.
It is more evidence that for China, tourism is an economic tool for its political gain.
Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, posted Whipps’ letter on social media and said that Beijing’s offer was an attempt to sever Palau’s relationship with the US and Taiwan.
It is nothing new that Beijing uses dollar diplomacy, and that China has long used its tourists as a weapon to pressure or reward other nations for political purposes, such as in 2017, when Beijing banned Chinese from traveling to Seoul after the US said it would deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system in South Korea.
Cross-strait tourism especially has been politically manipulated by China and its tourism agencies. China unilaterally cut the numbers of tourists and students traveling to Taiwan when President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took power in 2016, and completely banned Chinese tourists from visiting Taiwan in 2019.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan resumed reciprocal tourism relationships with the rest of the world and reopened to Chinese visitors, as well as allowing Taiwanese individual travelers to visit China.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications in August last year announced a plan to restart group tours to China next month, hoping China would open the door for Chinese wishing to visit Taiwan and resuming cross-strait tourism. However, China kept mum on allowing Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan, failing to reciprocate Taiwan’s goodwill.
Beijing then unilaterally altered flight routes near Taiwan, along with sending an increasing number of jets and ships over the median line of the Taiwan Strait, intentionally putting flight safety at risk and violating Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The Tourism Administration on Feb. 7 announced that it would be suspending its plan to restart group tours to China next month. Taiwanese who have already paid for tours to China between March 1 and May 31 would be allowed to go, but a complete ban is to take effect on June 1.
Some travel agencies, most of which rely heavily on the Chinese market, and pro-China politicians argued that the suspension is against the spirit of the free market, and even threatened to protest at the inauguration of president-elect William Lai (賴清德) in May. They refuse to acknowledge China’s manipulation of cross-strait tourism whereby Taiwanese can travel to China, but Chinese are banned from traveling to Taiwan, and which could make Taiwan suffer an estimated NT$ 80 billion(US$ 2.54 billion) deficit in tourism industry. For China, cross-strait tourism is a tool to hold Taiwanese firms relying on the manipulated market hostage.
Following last month’s elections, in which voters granted the Democratic Progressive Party a historic third term, despite China’s interference, Whipps’ letter has shown more evidence of Beijing using Chinese tourists to harm Taiwan’s international alliances.
“Continuing with this reopening policy without getting a friendly response is not something we can tolerate,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said.
Cross-strait tourism should be based on equal and reciprocal two-way travel, not sacrificing Taiwan’s national interests and dignity. Taiwan should be cautious about reopening group tours to China, and more importantly, should encourage the tourism industry to explore more domestic and international tours so as not to rely so heavily on the Chinese market.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
Taiwan should reject two flawed answers to the Eswatini controversy: that diplomatic allies no longer matter, or that they must be preserved at any cost. The sustainable answer is to maintain formal diplomatic relations while redesigning development relationships around transparency, local ownership and democratic accountability. President William Lai’s (賴清德) canceled trip to Eswatini has elicited two predictable reactions in Taiwan. One camp has argued that the episode proves Taiwan must double down on support for every remaining diplomatic ally, because Beijing is tightening the screws, and formal recognition is too scarce to risk. The other says the opposite: If maintaining
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), during an interview for the podcast Lanshuan Time (蘭萱時間) released on Monday, said that a US professor had said that she deserved to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize following her meeting earlier this month with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Cheng’s “journey of peace” has garnered attention from overseas and from within Taiwan. The latest My Formosa poll, conducted last week after the Cheng-Xi meeting, shows that Cheng’s approval rating is 31.5 percent, up 7.6 percentage points compared with the month before. The same poll showed that 44.5 percent of respondents
India’s semiconductor strategy is undergoing a quiet, but significant, recalibration. With the rollout of India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 2.0, New Delhi is signaling a shift away from ambition-driven leaps toward a more grounded, capability-led approach rooted in industrial realities and institutional learning. Rather than attempting to enter the most advanced nodes immediately, India has chosen to prioritize mature technologies in the 28-nanometer to 65-nanometer range. That would not be a retreat, but a strategic alignment with domestic capabilities, market demand and global supply chain gaps. The shift carries the imprimatur of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, indicating that the recalibration is
RSS