During Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan's (
It's hard not to laugh when reading such reports, which seem to suggest that all Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan will be high-rollers. The whole prospect has been wildly exaggerated. If such reports were to be believed, the Chinese are the richest people in the world.
It is true that some of the Chinese tourists are big spenders. The government is formulating strict policies to regulating the visits of Chinese tourists. Except for people who are visiting their relatives and working in this country or traveling with organized groups, most of these travellers are Chinese government officials or employees of China's state-run enterprises. Since they do not have to spend their own money while travelling here, it is hardly surprising that they spend freely.
The government should not allow unrestricted Chinese tourism. Leaving aside China's political and military threats against Taiwan, Chinese tourists remaining in this country after their visas expire or using tourism as a pretext to find work and other issues will lead to social and legal problems. Since Taiwan is a small nation it would only take a wave of a few hundred thousand illegal workers and immigrants to cause social order in Taiwan to collapse.
As for the political and security risks, who does not believe that Beijing would use the door opened by legal tourism to build a more far-reaching and comprehensive spy network in this country? If China were to launch an attack, this fifth column could attack the national defense network.
The issue of Chinese tourism has considerable economic implications as well. Given China's huge population, 2 million visits a year would not be at all impossible. This presents a bright prospect for Taiwan's airline, tourism and restaurant industries, with the probability of massive construction to meet increased demand. The result of this would be to put Taiwan's neck more firmly than ever in China's noose, because Beijing could just as easily halt the flow of tourists to this country and these industries would bear the brunt of such a blow.
After China announced that it would permit tourism to Taiwan, reports from Shanghai revealed that the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee had ordered the media to refrain from reporting on this matter. There has been no further word from Beijing about how tourism to Taiwan is to be handled, further raising suspicion as to the motives behind China's proposal.
The whole Chinese tourism offer is likely a ploy by Beijing to use Taiwan's pro-China forces to assist it in further deepening the domestic rifts over cross-strait policy. The government should give China the same answer to its offer of tourists as it did its offer of pandas -- thanks, but no thanks.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS