Notice all the tourists from China around? You don’t? That’s because they have not been permitted to enter Taiwan since the start of the pandemic. And before then, Beijing turned off the taps for PRC folks to travel to Taiwan as tourists, presumably to express displeasure about Taiwan’s democratic process in 2016, as brilliantly explained earlier in this thread by @hansioux .
One person who has thought a lot about this topic is now-NTNU faculty member Ian Rowen, who published a book on it with Cornell University Press. Following the pandemic, he reflects on how the situation looks now and where we might be heading:
Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism with author Ian Rowen
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
In One China, Many Taiwans, author Ian Rowen shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Rowen explores the impact of travel and tourism being reopened and what that means for these relationships today.
Summary
After nearly three years of pandemic closures, China finally reopened its borders to travel and tourism in January 2023. Today, the decisions being made by other countries as to how and when to again receive Chinese tourists pivot as much on geopolitical concerns as they do on considerations of health or security. This is because tourism is not just fun and games. Rather, it is an inescapably political practice with profound effects. In the case of tourism across the Taiwan Strait, the political stakes are even existential, as I demonstrate in my book, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism.
Taiwan, for decades a democratic, de facto independent republic, has long been claimed by a leadership in China that has never ruled it. Starting in 2008, tourism was used to strengthen ties between state and industry on both sides. Many businesspeople and politicians in Taiwan even welcomed the opening, anticipating a windfall. Yet, tourism served, I write, as a “stage for struggle over ethnic identity and national borders, a geopolitical instrument and event that performs and can potentially transform state territory.” Taiwanese society pushed back against its then-president’s China-centric policies, including tourism, by staging a mass protest in 2014. They soon elected a new leadership much more supportive of national self-determination, and cuts to tourism turned out to be one of China’s most publicized modes of retaliation. As I contend in the book, “contrary to the PRC’s efforts to incorporate Taiwan as part of an undivided “One China”, tourism actually aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther towards support for national self-determination.” Finally, by 2020, with the onset of the pandemic, whatever was left of the tourism trade came to a screeching halt. It has yet to resume, and may never will.
The field work I conducted, informed by my past work as a tour guide within China —circling Taiwan in buses with Chinese tour groups, interviewing independent travelers like the one who first learned about the 1989 Tian’anmen Massacre by casually browsing in a Taipei bookstore–is no longer possible today. As sad as the chill may be, it makes the material I collected that much more precious. The face-to-face interactions between Chinese guests and Taiwanese hosts, the personal and public representations of these interactions, and their implications for all involved are as poignant as they are provocative, and warrant further reflection.
The China-Taiwan relationship remains one of the keys to global (dis)order, a persistent fact that was less obvious to Anglophone readers when I first began researching this book in the 2010s, a time when ties between China and Taiwan appeared to be warming. Then, too, the geopolitical instrumentality and impact of tourism flew under the radar of observers, or was misconstrued entirely. No longer.
As the world again receives Chinese tourists, whether with excitement or trepidation, it has much to learn from Taiwan’s experience, as recounted in this book. So too do social scientists and area scholars who would like to better understand the cross-Strait encounter—the moments of affinity and alienation alike—that continue to characterize its condition, and will continue to affect the future not only of the region but of the planet.
Source: Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism with author Ian Rowen - Cornell University Press
Guy
