Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Ermell/WikiCommons/CC0
WITH CHINESE RESIDENTS of Fujian and Shanghai set to be allowed to resume group tours to Taiwan in the near future, it proves a question as to how Chinese and Taiwanese authorities will collaborate on managing such tours.
In particular, the Taiwanese government has called on the Chinese government to discuss the details of “familiarization trips” to Taiwan that will take place ahead of the reopening for group tours. Likewise, calls are that discussion should take place through the Taiwan Strait Tourism Association, representing Taiwan, as dialoguing with the Association For Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits, representing China.
The Lai administration is likely concerned about the possibility of the Chinese government seeking to route around its authority. For one, though it has been a continual refrain of the Lai administration that the Chinese government should allow group tours to Taiwan to resume, and that this should take place on the basis of parity and mutual respect. By contrast, the Chinese government has sought to pin the blame for group tours not resuming on the Lai administration, seeking to create the perception that it is the Lai administration that is unwilling to allow group tours to resume.
When group tours have been allowed to resume in some form, the Chinese government has sought to credit the relaxation of restrictions to negotiations conducted by KMT government officials such as legislative caucus leader Fu Kun-chi or Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an. The KMT, too, has sought to lean into this narrative, as part of its traditional claim to political legitimacy that it is the only party in Taiwan able to conduct negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party, and this is why it should be the political party that holds power in Taiwan.
The Straits Exchange Foundation. Photo credit: Meow/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
The broader pattern of KMT officials traveling to China to meet with Chinese counterparts has also sought to exclude the DPP from discussions with China. This has sometimes raised concerns about the possibility of KMT officials circumventing the elected government in Taiwan to conduct negotiations with China that might compromise Taiwan’s sovereignty, such as seeking to sign a peace treaty with China that would end the Chinese Civil War, but could potentially cede away Taiwan’s political freedoms.
Without communication between the two bodies, such “familiarization trips” may, likewise, be aimed at establishing an environment to keep Chinese group tours from experiencing Taiwan in an unfiltered lens. Chinese group tours historically managed participants so that they would experience a selective perception of Taiwan that did not rupture China’s ideological frame with regard to how it depicts Taiwan. This is not unlike how Taiwanese tour groups to China are also managed, to prevent them from seeing negative sides of China, and to create an ideological frame that engenders pro-unification sentiment.
Nevertheless, one notes that the Taiwanese government has long angled at meetings to take place between Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS). Specifically, the Lai administration hopes for meetings between SEF and ARATS, with the aim of producing a new consensus. The attempt is clearly to reproduce the optics of the 1992 Consensus, which the DPP has never accepted except as a post-facto fabrication by the KMT.
The Lai administration has termed the new possible consensus that would result as the “Two Six Consensus”. The Lai administration has placed unusually high-profile DPP politicians such as Cheng Wen-tsan and Luo Wen-jia as the head of the SEF in order to signal the importance of the institution to him, probably with the aim of building up for this consensus, resulting in the unusual phenomenon by which the head of the SEF outranks the head of the Mainland Affairs Council that the SEF is subordinate of.
The Lai administration is probably hesitant to some extent on the issue of tourism, seeing as the resumption of group tourism would give China an economic lever to influence Taiwan. At the same time, calling for the resumption of group tours would be a way of signaling goodwill toward China, and reinforcing that the Lai administration does not deliberately seek to provoke China. But, generally speaking, China seems more interested in using the economic lever of group tourism as a means of attacking the Lai administration, rather than using Chinese tourism as a way of influencing Taiwan through mutual economic dependency.