Interview | Taiwan Blocks Chinese Tour Scouts Twice, and No One Is Surprised

When Taiwan rejected a Chinese tourism delegation's scouting trip for the second time this year, Li Chiyueh, chairman of the Chinese Quality Tourism Development Association, said the reaction inside the trade was silence — not shock.

"Chinese tourism to Taiwan stopped being an economic issue a long time ago," Li told Storm Media. "It's a political issue. Everyone in the industry has already figured that out."

Li walked through how the latest rejection unfolded. Operators from Shanghai and Fujian sought permission to run a "familiarization tour" — the standard scouting visit Chinese tour groups conduct before outbound travel to a destination is formally reopened — and were turned down twice. The first application went through the National Federation of Travel Agents Associations; the second, through the Kaohsiung Travel Agents Association. Both were rejected by Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council for the same stated reason: the two sides needed to hold talks first through the cross-strait tourism "mini-talks" mechanism.

Li was blunt about what that precondition actually means. China's Taiwan Affairs Office has said the mini-talks cannot resume without Taiwan's acceptance of the 1992 Consensus — the formula under which both sides acknowledge "one China" while disputing its meaning. Since Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party rejects that framework, Li said, the council's own condition forecloses the visit before it can begin.

Asked why operators haven't pushed harder, Li said the channels of communication were never the problem. "Our communication with the Mainland Affairs Council has always been open," he said. "But it hasn't gotten us anywhere, because the council is only the front-line agency handling this. Behind it are national security considerations the council has no authority over."

He said Beijing has tried to keep the door open on its end by separating politics from commerce — arguing that ordinary tourism exchange doesn't need to wait on political dialogue with the DPP. In Li's view, that argument has made no headway in Taipei.

Li also pointed to a shift on Taiwan's side that he thinks gets less attention: the island's tourism industry no longer needs mainland visitors the way it once did. Years of restricted cross-strait travel forced operators to restructure or exit the mainland-dependent segment of the business entirely, he said, and few if any Taiwanese tourism businesses now rely on Chinese tourists to survive.

That, he argued, removes any real incentive for the DPP government to reopen the door. "There's simply no need for Taiwan's tourism industry to become dependent on mainland tourists again," he said.

Li's bottom line was matter-of-fact rather than pessimistic. "Nobody in the industry was surprised by this rejection," he said. "If the deadlock is ever going to break, it will probably take a change of government."

Original Article in Chinese

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