https://time.com/5639832/china-bans-travel-taiwan-tourists/
China Bans Citizens From Traveling to Taiwan as Individual Tourists
China Bans Citizens From Traveling to Taiwan as Individual Tourists
In its latest effort to increase pressure on Taiwan, Beijing said it will suspend a program that allowed individual tourists from 47 Chinese cities to travel to Taiwan, citing the current state of relations between the two sides.
Current Time 0:05
/
Duration 1:34
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In its latest effort to increase pressure on Taiwan, Beijing said it will suspend a program that allowed individual tourists from 47 Chinese cities to travel to Taiwan, citing the current state of relations between the two sides.
The ban is effective from Aug. 1, according to a statement Wednesday from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and means that Chinese nationals can only travel to Taiwan as tourists if they’re part of tour groups. The scheme had been in place since 2011 under the more China-friendly administration of former President Ma Ying-jeou.
The ministry’s statement didn’t provide any further details as to the reason for the ban. The unexpected move comes as China attempts to isolate Taiwan and Tsai Ing-wen, it’s independence-leaning president. The move may also be aimed at hurting her re-election chances in January’s presidential election.
China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying declined to answer a question about the decision, asking reporters at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon to talk to the relevant department for Taiwan affairs. The Mainland Affairs Council in Taipei declined to comment immediately when contacted.
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“This is a shock to all of us. We are all very worried about it,” Benny Wu, chairman of the Taipei Association of Travel Agents, said by phone. “This will have a huge impact on Taiwan’s tourism and economy. Hotels, restaurants will all be affected.”
Spending by foreign tourists accounted for about 2.2% of GDP in 2017, the last year for which data is available, according to the tourism bureau. China was the largest single source of people visiting Taiwan and accounted for almost one third of total visitors to the island in May 2019, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on data published by Taiwan’s tourism bureau.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/pol...-individual-travel-permits-taiwan-over-rising
Beijing’s ban on solo travellers to Taiwan could cost self-ruled island US$900 million by January
Beijing is set to ban solo travellers from the Chinese mainland visiting Taiwan. Photo: Panos
Beijing’s ban on solo travellers visiting Taiwan could result in 700,000 fewer arrivals over the next six months and cost the self-ruled island NT$28 billion (US$900.5 million) in lost revenue, an industry insider said.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism said that from Thursday it would stop issuing individual travel permits to people in 47 mainland Chinese cities because of the poor state of relations with Taiwan.
“In view of the current cross-strait situation, such visits will be temporarily restricted until further notice,” it said in an online statement on Wednesday.
Tourism-related government websites confirmed the ban would apply only to individuals.
In response to the announcement, Taiwanese Transport Minister Lin Chai-lung said his government would spend an additional NT$3.6 billion in the fourth quarter of the year on promoting tourism.
“Details, including preferential treatments for group and individual visitors [from other countries], will be announced soon,” he said in a Facebook post on Wednesday evening.
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The travel restriction comes five months ahead of Taiwan’s presidential election in January and amid tense relations between mainland China and the island it regards as a wayward province awaiting reunification.
Taiwan responds to Beijing’s military exercises with drill of its own
Robert Kao, head of the policy development committee under Taiwan’s Travel Agent Association, said the two issues were probably linked.
“It is rather unusual for Beijing to issue such a notice, which could have something to do with the presidential election,” he said.
It is not unusual for the mainland government to take a keen interest in Taiwan affairs, especially in the run-up to a presidential election, though the statement by the tourism ministry is the first time it has gone public on the issue.
In the months before the last leadership poll in 2016, Beijing told travel agents that mainland citizens would not be granted solo travel permits as it sought to reduce support for Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. The plan failed and Tsai has been in power ever since.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council condemned Beijing’s move for “breaking the travel agreement made between people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait”.
“We deeply regret the unilateral suspension of individual visits and free travel by mainland tourists to Taiwan,” it said in a statement on Wednesday.
It also urged Beijing to refrain from using politics to disrupt normal travel exchanges and to “resolve bilateral disputes without preconditions in order to facilitate the peaceful development of cross-strait relations”.
PLA starts Taiwan Strait drills amid rising tensions
Travel agents in Shanghai and Nanjing, which are among the cities to be hit with the restriction, confirmed they were aware of the rule change.
Anny Ren, a senior manager at Shanghai Jin Jiang Tours, said the ban on solo travel would be bad for business as most of her customers preferred to travel alone rather than as part of a group.
“Mainland tourists have not been as enthusiastic about going to Taiwan in recent years [since Tsai came to power],” she said. “Now that only group tours are allowed, I think the number [of visitors] from major cities like Shanghai could drop to nearly zero.”
Kao said that if relations between the two sides worsened it was possible Beijing might also suspend group tours, which would deal an even bigger blow to the island’s tourism industry.
More than 1 million people from the Chinese mainland visited Taiwan on solo travel permits last year. Photo: EPA-EFE
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According to Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency, 1.07 million individual travellers from the Chinese mainland visited the island last year, up about 2 per cent from 2017.
In the first half of this year, the total was 633,000 and the tourism authority forecast the full-year figure to reach 1.3 million.
Kao said that if the ban remained in place until after the election, individual visitor numbers would fall by 700,000.
Based on an average spend of NT$40,000 per solo traveller per visit, that would amount to about NT$28 billion in lost revenue, according to official figures.
Representatives of several van and taxi service companies, as well as hotel operators said the restriction could result in a 40 per cent drop in revenue.
Huang Jeng-tsung, a tourism professor at Providence University in the Taiwanese city of Taichung, said that although the ban would be implemented on Thursday its impact would not be felt until October or November because most mainlanders planning to travel to the island in the next couple of months had already been granted their travel permits.
But when visitor numbers did begin to dwindle, “the authorities must be ready to offer support to tourism-related businesses”, he said, adding that local travel agencies should also seek to offset the impact of the ban by targeting more visitors from Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asian nations.
Social media users said on Weibo – China’s Twitter-like service – on Wednesday that there had been a run on visa applications as people sought to beat the deadline.
Social media users said there was a run on visa application offices on Wednesday as people sought to beat the ban on travel permits. Photo: EPA
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Lin Chinfa, a former chairman of the Beijing chapter of the Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland, said he believed the travel restriction was unlikely to seriously alarm the business community.
“This is obviously a temporary move in response to the upcoming presidential elections in Taiwan. I think the mainland just wants to avoid any potential conflicts at this sensitive time,” he said.
“The Democratic Progressive Party might regard people visiting Taiwan from the mainland as possible spies or accuse them of meddling in the poll. So this is a way for Beijing to avoid any such trouble.
“Although the decision is quite unusual, for people who have been watching and feeling the changes in cross-strait ties for so many years, we know that once the election is over things will return to normal.
“If Han Kuo-yu [from the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang party] wins, I am sure the mainland will immediately resume the visa applications,” he said.
Han Kuo-yu says 2020 poll is life or death battle for Taiwan
Taiwan began allowing solo travellers from the Chinese mainland to visit the island in 2011, three years after granting the same permission to tour groups. The moves came as a result of warming ties across the Taiwan Strait during the administration of president Ma Ying-jeou from the Kuomintang.
In contrast, leaders in Beijing have been at odds with Tsai, who since becoming president has openly rejected Beijing’s model of “one country, two systems” as a way to resolve cross-strait conflicts.
She and other Taiwanese politicians have argued that the protests in Hong Kong in the past two months over the now-suspended extradition bill have shown the model to be a failure.
A defence white paper released by Beijing last week said China’s military was under threat from pro-independence forces in Taiwan, but said it would always defeat those fighting for the island’s independence.
Beijing has said repeatedly that it will not renounce the use of force to reunify Taiwan, but the white paper said it would be “by no means targeted at our compatriots in Taiwan, but at the interference of external forces and the very small number of ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists and their activities”.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Travel Ban could cost Taiwan up to HK$7b
https://tw.news.yahoo.com/陸禁赴台自由行-女星-台灣沒什麼好玩-幾乎都農村-050922719.html
陸禁赴台自由行 女星：台灣沒什麼好玩！幾乎都農村
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25.3k 人追蹤
莊雅婷
2019年8月2日 下午1:43
檢視相片
圖／翻攝自劉樂妍微博
中國大陸政府7月31日宣布，自8月1日起暫停47個城市居民來台自由行的通行證申請核發。消息曝光後，長期在大陸發展的前女F4團員
大陸官方停發來台自由簽證消息曝光後，引發網友熱議，大陸網友超關心男星李榮浩怎麼至台灣見女友楊丞琳，「李榮浩怎麼去台灣」關鍵字還登上熱搜，網友還好奇「李榮浩找楊丞琳需要跟團嗎？」
檢視相片
圖／翻攝自劉樂妍微博
長期待在大陸發展的劉樂妍被許多人問及對於台灣自由行被禁的看法，她在微博坦言，沒什麼看法，反而覺得台灣沒什麼好玩的，「除了台北市還有台中市、高雄市、新竹市、桃園市中心的一小區塊以外，其他幾乎都是農村，你在大陸都可以玩的到」。
劉樂妍表示，大家之所以想去台灣，就是想感受兩岸同胞血濃於水的情懷以及人民的友善，但在現今民進黨執政，這些東西已經沒有了。既然不能去，那就拉倒吧，「如果人家不歡迎不友好又有什麼好去的呢？大家開車自駕去大西北轉一圈多好呢，還不用辦證，你看阿克塞多好，甘肅，青海，新疆多好呢！我真的覺得在這裡玩超棒的」。
Freedom to travel to Taiwan. Actress: Taiwan is nothing fun! Almost all rural areas
[TVBS News Network]
TVBS News Network
25.3k person tracking
Zhuang Yating
August 2, 2019 1:43 PM
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
View photos
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
The Chinese mainland government announced on July 31 that it will suspend the application for a free pass for 47 city residents to come to Taiwan from August 1. After the news was exposed, the former female F4 member who had developed in the mainland for a long time
After the mainland officially stopped sending free visa information to Taiwan, it triggered a hot discussion among netizens. The mainland netizens care about the actor Li Ronghao and how to see his girlfriend Yang Yulin in Taiwan. "How does Li Ronghao go to Taiwan?" The keyword is also on the hot search. The netizen is also curious about "Li Ronghao" Looking for Yang Lanlin to follow the group?"
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
View photos
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
Liu Lejun, who is looking forward to the development of the mainland, was asked by many people about the ban on Taiwan’s free travel. She said frankly on Weibo that she had no idea. Instead, she felt that Taiwan had nothing to play with. “In addition to Taipei, there are Taichung City, Kaohsiung City, and Hsinchu. Outside the city and Taoyuan city center, the rest are almost all rural areas, and you can play in the mainland."
Liu Lejun said that the reason why everyone wants to go to Taiwan is to feel the feelings of the blood of the compatriots on both sides of the strait and the friendship of the people. But now that the DPP is in power, these things are gone. If you can't go, then pull it down. "If people don't welcome unfriendly and have something to go about? How much better to drive a car to the northwest, do not need a permit, you see Axedo, Gansu Qinghai, how good is Xinjiang! I really think that playing here is great."
China Bans Citizens From Traveling to Taiwan as Individual Tourists
China Bans Citizens From Traveling to Taiwan as Individual Tourists
In its latest effort to increase pressure on Taiwan, Beijing said it will suspend a program that allowed individual tourists from 47 Chinese cities to travel to Taiwan, citing the current state of relations between the two sides.
Current Time 0:05
/
Duration 1:34
You Might Like
China Says It Will Not Rule out Using Force to Reunify Taiwan With the Mainland
44 People Injured After Freak ‘Tsunami’ at a Wave Pool in China
Best Job in the World
By Bloomberg
July 31, 2019
In its latest effort to increase pressure on Taiwan, Beijing said it will suspend a program that allowed individual tourists from 47 Chinese cities to travel to Taiwan, citing the current state of relations between the two sides.
The ban is effective from Aug. 1, according to a statement Wednesday from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and means that Chinese nationals can only travel to Taiwan as tourists if they’re part of tour groups. The scheme had been in place since 2011 under the more China-friendly administration of former President Ma Ying-jeou.
The ministry’s statement didn’t provide any further details as to the reason for the ban. The unexpected move comes as China attempts to isolate Taiwan and Tsai Ing-wen, it’s independence-leaning president. The move may also be aimed at hurting her re-election chances in January’s presidential election.
China Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying declined to answer a question about the decision, asking reporters at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon to talk to the relevant department for Taiwan affairs. The Mainland Affairs Council in Taipei declined to comment immediately when contacted.
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“This is a shock to all of us. We are all very worried about it,” Benny Wu, chairman of the Taipei Association of Travel Agents, said by phone. “This will have a huge impact on Taiwan’s tourism and economy. Hotels, restaurants will all be affected.”
Spending by foreign tourists accounted for about 2.2% of GDP in 2017, the last year for which data is available, according to the tourism bureau. China was the largest single source of people visiting Taiwan and accounted for almost one third of total visitors to the island in May 2019, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on data published by Taiwan’s tourism bureau.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/pol...-individual-travel-permits-taiwan-over-rising
Beijing’s ban on solo travellers to Taiwan could cost self-ruled island US$900 million by January
- New rule, which is set to take effect on Thursday, likely to see visitor numbers fall by 700,000 over next six months, tourism expert says
- Restriction applies to residents of 47 mainland cities, tourism ministry says
Beijing is set to ban solo travellers from the Chinese mainland visiting Taiwan. Photo: Panos
Beijing’s ban on solo travellers visiting Taiwan could result in 700,000 fewer arrivals over the next six months and cost the self-ruled island NT$28 billion (US$900.5 million) in lost revenue, an industry insider said.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism said that from Thursday it would stop issuing individual travel permits to people in 47 mainland Chinese cities because of the poor state of relations with Taiwan.
“In view of the current cross-strait situation, such visits will be temporarily restricted until further notice,” it said in an online statement on Wednesday.
Tourism-related government websites confirmed the ban would apply only to individuals.
In response to the announcement, Taiwanese Transport Minister Lin Chai-lung said his government would spend an additional NT$3.6 billion in the fourth quarter of the year on promoting tourism.
“Details, including preferential treatments for group and individual visitors [from other countries], will be announced soon,” he said in a Facebook post on Wednesday evening.
SUBSCRIBE TO US China Trade War
Get updates direct to your inbox
By registering for these newsletters you agree to our T&C and Privacy Policy
The travel restriction comes five months ahead of Taiwan’s presidential election in January and amid tense relations between mainland China and the island it regards as a wayward province awaiting reunification.
Taiwan responds to Beijing’s military exercises with drill of its own
Robert Kao, head of the policy development committee under Taiwan’s Travel Agent Association, said the two issues were probably linked.
“It is rather unusual for Beijing to issue such a notice, which could have something to do with the presidential election,” he said.
It is not unusual for the mainland government to take a keen interest in Taiwan affairs, especially in the run-up to a presidential election, though the statement by the tourism ministry is the first time it has gone public on the issue.
In the months before the last leadership poll in 2016, Beijing told travel agents that mainland citizens would not be granted solo travel permits as it sought to reduce support for Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. The plan failed and Tsai has been in power ever since.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council condemned Beijing’s move for “breaking the travel agreement made between people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait”.
“We deeply regret the unilateral suspension of individual visits and free travel by mainland tourists to Taiwan,” it said in a statement on Wednesday.
It also urged Beijing to refrain from using politics to disrupt normal travel exchanges and to “resolve bilateral disputes without preconditions in order to facilitate the peaceful development of cross-strait relations”.
PLA starts Taiwan Strait drills amid rising tensions
Travel agents in Shanghai and Nanjing, which are among the cities to be hit with the restriction, confirmed they were aware of the rule change.
Anny Ren, a senior manager at Shanghai Jin Jiang Tours, said the ban on solo travel would be bad for business as most of her customers preferred to travel alone rather than as part of a group.
“Mainland tourists have not been as enthusiastic about going to Taiwan in recent years [since Tsai came to power],” she said. “Now that only group tours are allowed, I think the number [of visitors] from major cities like Shanghai could drop to nearly zero.”
Kao said that if relations between the two sides worsened it was possible Beijing might also suspend group tours, which would deal an even bigger blow to the island’s tourism industry.
More than 1 million people from the Chinese mainland visited Taiwan on solo travel permits last year. Photo: EPA-EFE
Share:
According to Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency, 1.07 million individual travellers from the Chinese mainland visited the island last year, up about 2 per cent from 2017.
In the first half of this year, the total was 633,000 and the tourism authority forecast the full-year figure to reach 1.3 million.
Kao said that if the ban remained in place until after the election, individual visitor numbers would fall by 700,000.
Based on an average spend of NT$40,000 per solo traveller per visit, that would amount to about NT$28 billion in lost revenue, according to official figures.
Representatives of several van and taxi service companies, as well as hotel operators said the restriction could result in a 40 per cent drop in revenue.
Huang Jeng-tsung, a tourism professor at Providence University in the Taiwanese city of Taichung, said that although the ban would be implemented on Thursday its impact would not be felt until October or November because most mainlanders planning to travel to the island in the next couple of months had already been granted their travel permits.
But when visitor numbers did begin to dwindle, “the authorities must be ready to offer support to tourism-related businesses”, he said, adding that local travel agencies should also seek to offset the impact of the ban by targeting more visitors from Hong Kong, Macau and Southeast Asian nations.
Social media users said on Weibo – China’s Twitter-like service – on Wednesday that there had been a run on visa applications as people sought to beat the deadline.
Social media users said there was a run on visa application offices on Wednesday as people sought to beat the ban on travel permits. Photo: EPA
Share:
Lin Chinfa, a former chairman of the Beijing chapter of the Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland, said he believed the travel restriction was unlikely to seriously alarm the business community.
“This is obviously a temporary move in response to the upcoming presidential elections in Taiwan. I think the mainland just wants to avoid any potential conflicts at this sensitive time,” he said.
“The Democratic Progressive Party might regard people visiting Taiwan from the mainland as possible spies or accuse them of meddling in the poll. So this is a way for Beijing to avoid any such trouble.
“Although the decision is quite unusual, for people who have been watching and feeling the changes in cross-strait ties for so many years, we know that once the election is over things will return to normal.
“If Han Kuo-yu [from the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang party] wins, I am sure the mainland will immediately resume the visa applications,” he said.
Han Kuo-yu says 2020 poll is life or death battle for Taiwan
Taiwan began allowing solo travellers from the Chinese mainland to visit the island in 2011, three years after granting the same permission to tour groups. The moves came as a result of warming ties across the Taiwan Strait during the administration of president Ma Ying-jeou from the Kuomintang.
In contrast, leaders in Beijing have been at odds with Tsai, who since becoming president has openly rejected Beijing’s model of “one country, two systems” as a way to resolve cross-strait conflicts.
She and other Taiwanese politicians have argued that the protests in Hong Kong in the past two months over the now-suspended extradition bill have shown the model to be a failure.
A defence white paper released by Beijing last week said China’s military was under threat from pro-independence forces in Taiwan, but said it would always defeat those fighting for the island’s independence.
Beijing has said repeatedly that it will not renounce the use of force to reunify Taiwan, but the white paper said it would be “by no means targeted at our compatriots in Taiwan, but at the interference of external forces and the very small number of ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists and their activities”.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Travel Ban could cost Taiwan up to HK$7b
https://tw.news.yahoo.com/陸禁赴台自由行-女星-台灣沒什麼好玩-幾乎都農村-050922719.html
陸禁赴台自由行 女星：台灣沒什麼好玩！幾乎都農村
TVBS新聞網
25.3k 人追蹤
莊雅婷
2019年8月2日 下午1:43
檢視相片
圖／翻攝自劉樂妍微博
中國大陸政府7月31日宣布，自8月1日起暫停47個城市居民來台自由行的通行證申請核發。消息曝光後，長期在大陸發展的前女F4團員
大陸官方停發來台自由簽證消息曝光後，引發網友熱議，大陸網友超關心男星李榮浩怎麼至台灣見女友楊丞琳，「李榮浩怎麼去台灣」關鍵字還登上熱搜，網友還好奇「李榮浩找楊丞琳需要跟團嗎？」
檢視相片
圖／翻攝自劉樂妍微博
長期待在大陸發展的劉樂妍被許多人問及對於台灣自由行被禁的看法，她在微博坦言，沒什麼看法，反而覺得台灣沒什麼好玩的，「除了台北市還有台中市、高雄市、新竹市、桃園市中心的一小區塊以外，其他幾乎都是農村，你在大陸都可以玩的到」。
劉樂妍表示，大家之所以想去台灣，就是想感受兩岸同胞血濃於水的情懷以及人民的友善，但在現今民進黨執政，這些東西已經沒有了。既然不能去，那就拉倒吧，「如果人家不歡迎不友好又有什麼好去的呢？大家開車自駕去大西北轉一圈多好呢，還不用辦證，你看阿克塞多好，甘肅，青海，新疆多好呢！我真的覺得在這裡玩超棒的」。
Freedom to travel to Taiwan. Actress: Taiwan is nothing fun! Almost all rural areas
[TVBS News Network]
TVBS News Network
25.3k person tracking
Zhuang Yating
August 2, 2019 1:43 PM
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
View photos
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
The Chinese mainland government announced on July 31 that it will suspend the application for a free pass for 47 city residents to come to Taiwan from August 1. After the news was exposed, the former female F4 member who had developed in the mainland for a long time
After the mainland officially stopped sending free visa information to Taiwan, it triggered a hot discussion among netizens. The mainland netizens care about the actor Li Ronghao and how to see his girlfriend Yang Yulin in Taiwan. "How does Li Ronghao go to Taiwan?" The keyword is also on the hot search. The netizen is also curious about "Li Ronghao" Looking for Yang Lanlin to follow the group?"
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
View photos
Figure / flipping from Liu Lewei Weibo
Liu Lejun, who is looking forward to the development of the mainland, was asked by many people about the ban on Taiwan’s free travel. She said frankly on Weibo that she had no idea. Instead, she felt that Taiwan had nothing to play with. “In addition to Taipei, there are Taichung City, Kaohsiung City, and Hsinchu. Outside the city and Taoyuan city center, the rest are almost all rural areas, and you can play in the mainland."
Liu Lejun said that the reason why everyone wants to go to Taiwan is to feel the feelings of the blood of the compatriots on both sides of the strait and the friendship of the people. But now that the DPP is in power, these things are gone. If you can't go, then pull it down. "If people don't welcome unfriendly and have something to go about? How much better to drive a car to the northwest, do not need a permit, you see Axedo, Gansu Qinghai, how good is Xinjiang! I really think that playing here is great."
