Chinese tourists hit taiwan today. 大陸大来！！
how many days before the first incident? Y’know, a group of Chinese guys go out and get wasted and start shouting “Taiwan belongs to us!” and get their asses kicked. Or FLG protesters and Chinese tourists go head to head?
I’m betting on 2 weeks max.
Any takers?
I doubt it. But they may get mad when they find that some higher end hotels don’t want their business.
The Chinese tourists were carefully chosen by their government. They had to have a certain level of income, education, and to have had overseas travel experience. Trust me, the CCP doesn’t want its people embrassing it any more than we want to see them embarass themselves.
So I would say it will be a long time.
[quote=“Muzha Man”]The Chinese tourists were carefully chosen by their government. They had to have a certain level of income, education, and to have had overseas travel experience. Trust me, the CCP doesn’t want its people embrassing it any more than we want to see them embarass themselves.
So I would say it will be a long time.[/quote]
Screw that.
As soon as Bubba 2 Guns gets back, we’re going to get all hopped up on fermented mi chou and whip its, go downtown and find some of them, and start some trouble…
[quote=“the chief”][quote=“Muzha Man”]The Chinese tourists were carefully chosen by their government. They had to have a certain level of income, education, and to have had overseas travel experience. Trust me, the CCP doesn’t want its people embrassing it any more than we want to see them embarass themselves.
So I would say it will be a long time.[/quote]
Screw that.
As soon as Bubba 2 Guns gets back, we’re going to get all hopped up on fermented mi chou and whip its, go downtown and find some of them, and start some trouble…[/quote]
Make 'em squeal like a pig, chief. 
[quote=“Muzha Man”][quote=“the chief”][quote=“Muzha Man”]The Chinese tourists were carefully chosen by their government. They had to have a certain level of income, education, and to have had overseas travel experience. Trust me, the CCP doesn’t want its people embrassing it any more than we want to see them embarass themselves.
So I would say it will be a long time.[/quote]
Screw that.
As soon as Bubba 2 Guns gets back, we’re going to get all hopped up on fermented mi chou and whip its, go downtown and find some of them, and start some trouble…[/quote]
Make 'em squeal like a pig, chief. [/quote]
“Hey, Bubba! This Commie-boy gots a REAL purty mouth on him!!”
They may be hand-picked, but I doubt they will be able to curb their rhetoric towards the renegade province. Whilst in BeiJing, our tour guide, while watching two of our group figuring out his tip, engaged in some pretty violent descriptions of what the PRC would do to the ROC if it had the audacity to push the envelope of independence. Just can’t help themselves. You all know about this thing called “face”, right?
Likewise, there are plenty of red teeth out there ready to spit binlang juice on anything dalu.
I’m with the OP. Won’t be long…
You know, the tourists aren’t visiting the Pig and Whistle in Kaohsiung. I’m sure the nice middle class folk staying at the nice hotels in Sun Moon Lake will get along very well. Don’t forget, there are a million Taiwanese living in China and millions more visiting every year. Do you hear of crazy incidents there with locals and Taiwanese? No. Most Chinese will reflexively say Taiwan is part of China but aren’t disturbed enough as cctang to actually take it any further.
There’s dipshits everywhere, but I think you’ll find most people will be as interested as the open eyed commie bretheren in the cool off of this long running cold war.
And a lot of your betel nut chewing Taiwanese yardboys have already rubbed shoulders with the commies during their sex tours of southern China or in their grubby factory operations. You know wherever the whores are a plenty in southern Chinese cities like Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Zhiongshan or Dongguan, you can usually find many shops selling “Taiwan binlang”.
HG
No the Taiwanese are expected to take all such insults and abuse, and keep their mouths shut. I expect it is assumed that this should not be too much of a problem. The Taiwanese did this before… 1949 or there abouts… Chinese visitors coming over and planning to stay for a while… was it 5 years or something…
So lets all party like its 1949
[quote=“Huang Guang Chen”]There’s dipshits everywhere, but I think you’ll find most people will be as interested as the open eyed commie bretheren in the cool off of this long running cold war.
And a lot of your betel nut chewing Taiwanese yardboys have already rubbed shoulders with the commies during their sex tours of southern China or in their grubby factory operations. You know wherever the whores are a plenty in southern Chinese cities like Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Zhiongshan or Dongguan, you can usually find many shops selling “Taiwan binlang”.
HG[/quote]
You do shake the cobwebs off the eyes. 
[quote=“Muzha Man”]The Chinese tourists were carefully chosen by their government… Trust me, the CCP doesn’t want its people embrassing it any more than we want to see them embarass themselves.
So I would say it will be a long time.[/quote]
I’d say not so long, in part because, as you noted, the tourists are carefully chosen by Beijing, which has never shown much reluctance to throw a hissy fit about anything and everything where Taiwan is concerned. The CCP turns things on and off at its will (though not always as effectively as it might like). It will certainly find occasion to want to put down Taiwan through the visitors.
And what we see as an embarrassment the CCP might not – quite the contrary. How long before some Chinese tourists get indignant and huffy about some soul-shattering event like seeing an ROC flag? And though I will be little surprised when the KMT and business owners apologize profusely for such atrocities against the sensibilities of the visitors and immediately work to remove the offending object, eventually people in Taiwan with other points of view are going to get involved.
They’re not just carefully chosen - or rather approved - they also have to stump a considerable deposit to ensure they return. Currently to travel to Europe they have to put down, or negotiate a guarantee, with an agent for around Rmb100k. I bet Taiwan will be that if not higher.
HG
You could be right, cranky, but then it would be a CCP instigated event and not really something we can blaim on the tourists themselves.
In any case, I think all of this is good, as Taiwanese are being forced by the swiftness of KMT policy changes, and by Beijing’s typical last minute adjustments to agreements, to consider exactly what they really believe. As I wrote before, Ma promised stability but that simply isn’t possible in Taiwan when there are so many competing interests, and when the majority are not at all happy to sell themselves out.
I’m curious though if Beijing would bother to create an incident to humiliate Taiwanese as surely they have learned over the years that such incidents only strengthen Taiwanese resolve not to be annexed or form too close a relationship. If we look at the most recent election the lack of Beijing sword-rattling was telling. They do seemed to have learned how not to provoke Taiwanese into defensive postures, so again, I have my doubts they would be so stupid to provoke a tourist incident. Surely they know the public is of two minds about the tourists at all, and are certainly unhappy that the numbers have unilaterally been cut to a third of what they should have been.
Now that the economic gains are looking smaller and smaller, and will affect very few people, the public is looking at tourists with a much more critical eye. It’s one thing to sell out to become rich. It’s another to sell out to make others rich.
[quote=“cranky laowai”][quote=“Muzha Man”]The Chinese tourists were carefully chosen by their government… Trust me, the CCP doesn’t want its people embrassing it any more than we want to see them embarass themselves.
So I would say it will be a long time.[/quote]
I’d say not so long, in part because, as you noted, the tourists are carefully chosen by Beijing, which has never shown much reluctance to throw a hissy fit about anything and everything where Taiwan is concerned. The CCP turns things on and off at its will (though not always as effectively as it might like). It will certainly find occasion to want to put down Taiwan through the visitors.
And what we see as an embarrassment the CCP might not – quite the contrary. How long before some Chinese tourists get indignant and huffy about some soul-shattering event like seeing an ROC flag? And though I will be little surprised when the KMT and business owners apologize profusely for such atrocities against the sensibilities of the visitors and immediately work to remove the offending object, eventually people in Taiwan with other points of view are going to get involved.[/quote]
You’re assuming that Chinese people actually care about this stuff, as opposed to pretending to care because they’re scared of what will happen if they don’t toe the line. If you look at other dictatorships, the people became much less nationalist once they knew they didn’t need to be.
iht.com/articles/2008/07/03/ … php?page=1
[quote]TAIPEI: Outside a popular tourist site in Taipei on a baking-hot morning recently, Gao Mingzhu, 56, a visitor from Beijing, took a break in the shade and posed as his tour group companion took a picture.
A few meters away 10 members of Falun Gong, the spiritual group outlawed as an “evil cult” in China, were greeting the newly arrived Chinese tourists and trying to pass out promotional flyers and newspaper articles.
Gao shook his head disapprovingly. “They’re cheating people,” he said.
But when one of the Falun Gong members, Jou Chi-ying, 68, approached, Gao turned all smiles. Indeed, after some initial uneasiness, the scene quickly became something of a cross-Strait love fest.
“See, we in the Republic of China are so polite to visitors, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” said Jou, using Taiwan’s formal name.[/quote]
The Falun Gong say that reaction to them has been mixed
[quote]“We only criticize the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people,” Chang said. “We know almost every person in China criticizes the CCP almost every day. If more Chinese people know the truth, we think we’ll be able stop the persecution of Falun Gong in China.”
Falun Gong members acknowledge that mainland tourists almost never accept their material, and that some react badly.
“Sometimes they give us a 'thumbs up”’ of approval, said one Falun Gong volunteer who asked not to be named, because she was not authorized to speak for the group. “But sometimes they criticize us. They say 'Exercise is fine, but don’t do this political activity.”[/quote]
If I was going back to China, I don’t think I’d want a Falun Gong leaflet either. But the thumbs up sign makes me wonder if Chinese people really see the FLG as a problem. Certainly if China is like Eastern Europe people secretly hate the government and will think any group it criticizes is in the right. Hell when Communism fell in Eastern Europe lots of complete scumbags became popular, purely because they had been criticized constantly by governments everyone hated. Maybe we should be grateful to the CCP by being so nationalistic, because nationalism sucks and in the long run they are damaging it by association.
My conversations with people in China lead me, and most others I have discussed this with, to believe people do buy the Taiwan is part of China propaganda. They will tell you it when sober, drunk, alone, in public, in China, abroad, etc. No one is acting scared in China anymore (or few). They do not at all appear to be like eastern Europeans during the cold war. They do like their government, especially the middle class that has been made wealthy by the policies of the past 20 years. They are also proud (justifiably) of the re-emergence of China as a world power. It’s hard when you are there not to get caught up in the sense that change and improvement are everywhere. To most people, annexing Taiwan is a glorious affair. HK, Macau, Taiwan. It falls off everyone’s lips, like a magical mantra. It makes people feel good to imagine a unified country. It feels progressive.
I teach a load of middle class well educated students who are also foaming at the mouth nationalist should you mention anything about taiwan/tibet/flg/etc
the millions living in China, just like the ones abroad keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to get into a fight with the chinese -especially in china. however I curious as to what will happen if they have to listen to those kind of things on their “home turf”, as it were.
I teach a load of middle class well educated students who are also foaming at the mouth nationalist should you mention anything about taiwan/tibet/flg/etc
the millions living in China, just like the ones abroad keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to get into a fight with the Chinese -especially in China. however I curious as to what will happen if they have to listen to those kind of things on their “home turf”, as it were.[/quote]
Are you talking about Taiwanese or Chinese students?
The Chinese tourists will be on tight schedule ferried around on tour buses visiting places like CKS Memorial, Sun Moon Lake, and Alishan. Their tour guides will do their best to avoid the Chinese guests from seeing things they don’t want to see (like Falungong) and talking to people who have different opinions. There won’t be any incidents because everything is going to be scripted to make sure that the Chinese tourists don’t interact with the real Taiwan.
Mmm… I am with TNT on this one. taiwanese care a lot about their bottom line, and I believe it would take a lot to ruffle their feathers enough to endanger their bottom line.
If any incident do arises, I agree with Cranky that there would be a high possibility it would be a staged one for maximun effect towards a certain purpose -like when the Diayoutai incident’s “recreational fisheermen” appeared on TV, did you notice how young and articulate those college age kids were while explaining how they used the raft to save themselves?-. It would require thugs, and we know those are easy to hire.
As to Mucha Man’s angle, well, there are quite a lot of people who think “Taiwan is Chinese and belongs to China” in Taiwan as it is…
If most Taiwanese have not stood against their own people when they go with the “We are Chinese, this is the Republic of China” mantra or the “China will be the next superpower, the only way to save Taiwan from economic debacle is to join it no or perish” evangelism, then why should they go against Chinese Mainlanders who also have been imprinted with these concepts since birth?
My money is: until after the Olympics. No need for theatrics after that.