Mainland tourists in Taiwan will not jump ship
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As a sign of warming ties between Taiwan and the mainland, Taiwan's Kuomingtang administration wants to lift the ban on visits by individual mainland tourists.
In 2008, Taiwan authorities eased restrictions on tourists from the mainland.
However, mainlanders who want to discover Taiwan are still obliged to come in groups, since no visas are issued to individual travelers.
Business visas are widely available, but simple sight-seeing or visiting friends or relatives has to be managed through a tourist agent, which is highly inconvenient for mainlanders, especially those with ties to the island.
Although Taiwan has been capitalizing on the influx of mainland visitors, the profits have been reaped in by a handful of tour operators and hotels and restaurants with star-level.
By contrast, small and medium-sized Taiwanese businesses which form the backbone of the island's economy have effectively been left out of the recent cross-Taiwan Straits tourism boom.
Taiwan's neighbor to the south, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has long ago discovered that individually traveling visitors bring with them the wide distribution of holiday money to almost every corner of the host country or region.
Unsurprisingly, Taiwan's opposition is against the plan, saying Taiwan isn't prepared to open up to mainlanders who come on their own.
On July 7 at long last, Taiwan authorities declared that it intends to end the discriminative visa regulations for mainland tourists.
However, the opposition politician Pan Men-han said the measure could lead to main-land tourists abusing Taiwanese hospitality.
To give weight to his claim, Pan pointed at Germany and France. The latter two, according to Pan, are examples of countries that suffer from Chinese tourists overstaying their visas to work illegally.
A query, however, reveals that the allegation has been made up. The German National Tourist Board states that although the EU does have problems with migration, Chinese tourists are not part of it. Statistics from German authorities support this assessment.
"Within the last couple of years, I haven't heard of any case where a Chinese tourist overstayed an individual visa," Horst Lommatzsch, a director with the German National Tourist Board, said in an interview with the Global Times.
"Of course there might be the occasional traveler who misses a flight or falls ill, but that happens to visitors of other nationalities as well."
Lommatzsch explained that in the EU, individual Chinese tourists enjoy a reputation for trustworthiness since they apply for their visas in person in the EU's embassies in China.
Therefore, if a Chinese tourist wanted to use a tourist visa to live and work in France or Germany illegally, as Pan claims frequently happens, he or she would certainly chose to enter the EU with a tour group.
According to Lommatzsch, visas for tour groups are handled by agents, and that makes it easier for applicants to cheat on the required documentation.
Does that mean that Chinese who travel the EU individually are good, and Chinese who come in organized groups are bad?
A look at the German government's statistics answers this question. The share of Chinese tourists who overstay group visas is a long way from reaching 1 percent.
Pan, being a politician, has the right to make the case against mainlanders visiting Taiwan individually. He didn't chose to speak to me when I wrote this article, however, despite a request for an interview.
But perhaps he should choose his arguments more carefully in the future?
The author is a Taipei-based reporter. Before he came to Asia, he worked as a TV editor in his native Germany. kenslastner@ googlemail.com
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