Despite months without a positive response from Beijing, the government on Friday last week announced that it would go ahead with a plan to reopen to Chinese tour groups and allow Taiwanese tours to travel to China by March 1 next year at the latest.
The decision was criticized as a reversal from its statement last month, when Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said cross-strait tourism would be put on hold for the time being and re-evaluated in the new year, as Beijing had failed to reciprocate its overtures.
Group tourism across the Taiwan Strait has been halted for three years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, although even before then China had banned individual tourists from traveling to Taiwan.
Attempts to restart cross-strait tourism have proceeded in fits and starts this year, stymied by sensitive politics while the rest of the world left pandemic restrictions far in the rear view. On May 19, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) announced that Chinese travel agencies could immediately resume receiving group tours from Taiwan, catching Taipei off-guard. As the decision was made unilaterally, the then-Tourism Bureau (now the Tourism Administration) declined to reciprocate, saying that regulations should be discussed bilaterally through existing channels, even while it welcomed the decision in principle.
Then in August, the Mainland Affairs Council extended an olive branch by opening Taiwan to Chinese tourists living abroad, or in Hong Kong or Macau, and to Chinese on short-term business visas. It also announced that it planned to reopen to tour groups, pending a one-month “preparation period,” during which it would wait for Beijing’s response.
The TAO issued a fierce response, accusing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government of attempting to erect more barriers to cross-strait travel by proposing an initial cap of 2,000 people per day traveling in each direction, to be lifted later on. Taipei’s mild suggestion clearly did not merit such an intense response, laying bare China’s political machinations.
With January’s pivotal elections approaching, it was never likely that Beijing was going to play nice with the DPP administration. A key part of its “united front” strategy — especially ahead of elections — is to paint the DPP as bad for cross-strait relations by refusing to work with the party at any juncture and arbitrarily throwing up more barriers.
Tourism is a useful cudgel, which it used in 2019 before the 2020 presidential and legislative elections. By banning individual tourists from traveling to Taiwan, many voters interpreted it as an indictment of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and accused her of mishandling cross-strait relations. Some even came to see the move as Tsai’s decision, rather than stemming from Beijing.
With the government’s latest announcement that it is to move ahead with reopening cross-strait group travel, regardless of Beijing’s response, the DPP administration is making a concerted effort to break the stand-off across the Strait. It is also the right move if it aims to thwart Chinese election interference.
Many Taiwanese already view the DPP as being bad for cross-strait affairs, and its insistence on respectful reciprocation from Beijing was beginning to look petty to voters. The government was of course justified in demanding respect, as the truly petty actor in this exchange has been Beijing, which acted unilaterally and then resorted to name-calling and petulant silence when it did not get its way. However, by showing magnanimity in the face of Beijing’s acrimony for the sake of the nation’s tour operators and hospitality industry, which have been clamoring for a reopening, it makes clear to voters that the DPP is reasonable regarding cross-strait affairs — it is Beijing that plays with cross-strait policy when it is politically beneficial to do so.
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