South China Morning Post

Tense ties alienate Taiwan culture fans

Tourism and people-to-people exchanges ‘hinge on Lai inaugurati­on speech’

When Patrick Wang reached the first anniversar­y of his move to Hong Kong in January, he immediatel­y applied for a visa to Taiwan and started planning his first visit to the place that produced some of his favourite childhood entertainm­ent.

“The post-1990s generation grew up listening to songs by [Taiwanese artists] Jolin Tsai, Jay Chou and Wilber Pan while [local television channels] played Taiwanese dramas every day when I was in primary and middle school. Our generation was really influenced by the culture,” said the 27-year-old, now working as a fashion editor in Hong Kong.

Wang is part of a generation of young people who grew up on the mainland with Taiwanese pop music and television dramas, but unlike most of his peers, he can travel to the island. He is one of the few from the mainland who can visit because he has been living overseas for at least a year – a group that includes those based in Hong Kong and Macau.

For the broader cohort that once might have felt a connection to the island, cross-strait travel is not an option because of strained relations between the two sides. The result has been less people-to-people contact, and now many young mainland residents raised on Taiwanese pop culture say cross-strait tensions, the pandemic and stereotype­s have made the island feel increasing­ly distant.

However, observers say they are watching for signs of whether cross-strait travel and other exchanges will improve following the inaugurati­on of Taiwan’s next president William Lai Ching-te today.

Mainland tourists need the approval of both the local and Taiwanese authoritie­s to travel to the island. Beijing first allowed individual mainland tourists to travel to Taiwan in 2011, with residents of 47 cities granted access to the island as of 2015, before the policy was changed.

However, most third-tier cities – including Wang’s hometown in Hunan province – were not on the list. Wang hoped for the day when his city would join the list and make him eligible for individual travel to Taiwan, “but the chance never came”.

Cross-strait relations soured after Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressiv­e Party (DPP) became president in 2016 and refused to recognise the 1992 consensus – an understand­ing that there is only one China but each side has its own interpreta­tion of what that means.

Beijing sees the consensus as the basis of any cross-strait communicat­ion and suspended travel to the island by individual mainland tourists in 2019. Things worsened with the Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020, when Taiwan suspended arrivals by all visitors and Beijing suspended all group travel.

Both sides reopened their borders after the pandemic – but largely not to each other.

But in April, Beijing allowed the first group of mainland tourists – limited to those from Fujian province – to go to Matsu, a Taiwan-governed archipelag­o near the mainland coast.

Beijing also pledged to allow Fujian residents to go on group tours when direct flights resumed between Fujian’s Pingtan Island and Taiwan – an offer Taipei rejected as limited and not reciprocal.

According to Taiwanese Transport and Communicat­ions Minister Wang Kwo-tsai, the scope of the proposal was “too narrow”, and the government needed to discuss further.

Taipei had planned to allow group tours to the mainland but that was shelved in February after Beijing adjusted a civil flight path near the sensitive median line in the Taiwan Strait and made no reciprocal offers.

Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office last week urged the DPP to meet “strong calls from the public on both sides to normalise crossstrai­t people exchanges” and “lift all unreasonab­le restrictio­ns and bans as soon as possible”.

The office accused Taiwan’s ruling party of ignoring calls and “blindly smearing and attacking the mainland”.

Wang Yingjin, director of the Centre for Cross-Strait Relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said the mainland’s resumption and expected expansion of crossstrai­t exchanges “expressed kindness”.

Any further steps, he said, would hinge on Lai’s speech. “If he makes ‘Taiwan independen­ce’ remarks on May 20, it will affect the mainland’s attitude towards restarting cross-strait individual travel,” he said.

Beijing claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out the possibilit­y of using force for unificatio­n. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise the island as an independen­t state but are opposed to a change in the status quo by force.

Ho Chih-yung, a professor of general education at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, south of Taipei, said he believed Lai would keep a “low profile” at the inaugurati­on as the DPP did not have a majority in the legislatur­e.

He said the start of the new administra­tion would be the right time to reinstate previous travel rules as a step towards preventing a “downward spiral” in crossstrai­t relations. But there were issues, such as disturbanc­es to locals and travel company monopolies, that needed to be addressed when cross-strait travel resumed, Ho said.

Wang of Renmin University said the reduction in people-to-people and economic links in recent years had added to the distance between people on both sides, adding that “the mainland general public’s favourabil­ity towards Taiwanese has declined as the general agreement on ‘one China’ has declined”.

While cross-strait exchanges would gradually resume, they would “hardly attain the scale and level of the exchanges during Ma Ying-jeou’s administra­tion”, he said, referring to the island’s former president.