Beijing on Aug. 10 announced the third group of nations that Chinese tour groups can visit, with Taiwan conspicuously absent from the list, in one more attempt at economic coercion that is likely designed to affect next year’s presidential election.
As part of its reopening to the world in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era, China since February has released three lists of target destinations for tour groups, which covers 138 nations, but Taiwan, a model nation for pandemic controls, was consistently excluded.
Beijing, which has banned independent Chinese tourists from Taiwan since August 2019 and group travel since 2020, has shown no intention to resume cross-strait travel. Taiwan, on the other hand, allows individuals to travel to China and the government has conveyed Taiwan’s goodwill in reopening group tours across the Taiwan Strait.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) on May 8 said that Chinese travel agencies would be allowed to resume business involving Taiwanese tourist groups, but remained silent about lifting ban on Chinese traveling to Taiwan or resuming talks.
Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said that Taiwan and China must mutually show goodwill before normal cross-strait tourism could resume. The regulations on cross-strait group travel should also be negotiated through existing channels, such as the tourism associations in Taiwan and China, to ensure that cross-strait travel is reinstated reciprocally.
Beijing has long used tourists as tools of economic coercion to suppress democratic nations. In addition to limiting Chinese tourists to Taiwan after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was elected in 2016, China once banned its tourists from traveling to South Korea due to Beijing’s discontent at Seoul’s deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system.
China has obviously again taken Taiwan’s presidential election into consideration in not allowing Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan, aiming to hinder the campaign of Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, who leads in the polls.
However, instead of blaming China for banning travel to Taiwan, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and some travel agencies speciously accused Tsai and the government of not showing enough goodwill to Beijing, and suggested that Taiwan should extend an olive branch by sending Taiwanese tour groups to China.
They seem to have deliberately ignored some bitter lessons learned from previous cross-strait exchanges, specifically that there used to be a tourist deficit across the Strait, with more Taiwanese traveling and spending money in China than Chinese tourists in Taiwan. In 2014 and 2015, while then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the KMT encouraged cross-strait travel, 2.8 million Chinese — 4.1 million at the peak — were traveling annually to Taiwan, significantly fewer than the more than 5 million Taiwanese traveling to China.
Many tourism operators also complained that the China-oriented tourism sector had long been dominated by Chinese “one dragon” firms, which monopolize the transportation, accommodation, meals and shopping itineraries of Chinese tour groups to keep most of the expenditure in China.
Another phenomenon is that although international tourist levels have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, domestic hotel rates in Taiwan hit a record high last year, which has driven more Taiwanese to travel abroad.
Taiwan welcomes tourism exchanges with all nations, including China, but communication should be both ways. The government should be wary of an inappropriate reopening of travel across the Strait, which would worsen the tourism deficit, and sabotage the tourism market and quality in Taiwan.
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