A friend on Facebook sent me a video of a wonderful skit performed by the Tourism industry "protesters" in front of the Presidential office today. The "tree" of tourists was planted by President Ma, and its fruit attracted many animals (tourists), then the evil witch cut down the tree. By not saying that Taiwan is part of China.
No one seems to have imagined that Tsai might say she accepts that Taiwan is part of China and the tourists may still not come back. Remember how we were promised there would be FTAs if only we signed ECFA? China never said that, and years later the Ma Administration was forced to admit that China was blocking trade agreements. Now we are in exactly the same position -- China has publicly maintained that the fall off in group tours is due to market forces -- so there is no guarantee the taps will be turned back on even if Tsai kow-tows.
The tourist thing is shaping up to be a major KMT-led attack on the Tsai Administration. Which is good because nobody likes Chinese tourists and Taiwanese know a scam when they hear one. The KMT is nailing its flag to (yet another) detested mast.
The Taipei Times hosted an excellent commentary today on the tourism issue, don't miss it. The TSU pointed out that Chinese tourism has dumbed down the whole tourism market. It will be a relief when the group tours disappear and the high paying Korean and Japanese tourists return.
Meanwhile a UDN editorial translated by the KMT news organ argues that the KMT has three major problems.
The first of the KMT's three major obstacles is the lack of an internal party line. Next year's party chairmanship election will apparently be contested only by Hung Shiu-chu and Wu Den-yih. That is not a good sign. Wu and Hung each have their strengths and weaknesses. But neither has offered a vision for the party attractive enough to inspire the public. Meanwhile, rival party factions are covertly mobilizing. The battle is bound to form along "nativist" and "non-nativist" lines.This will be yet another round in the long struggle between the Taiwanese faction politicians who form the base of the KMT's political strength, and the mainlanders who control the party. We saw this first in the Ma Ying-jeou vs. Wang Jin-pyng election, when elites supported Wang but the Old Soldiers all voted Ma. Then another round was fought this year when current Chairman Hung Hsiu-chu beat Huang Min-hui, a Taiwanese politician from southern Taiwan, again with some elites supporting Huang but the conservative Deep Blue Old Soldiers supporting Hung. Most of that crowd will still be around in Aug of 2017, and Hung will probably win another Chairmanship election, even though Wu will have the support of the Party's mainlander elites and the Taiwanese factions.
The second problem UDN identifies is the lack of strong candidates. Many of us have noticed that.
Finally UDN says...
The third major obstacle the KMT faces is its procrastination and indecision in letting go of its party assets. KMT party assets have become a major political burden.When even UDN admits this, it's really time for the assets to go.
An Indonesian maid was raped by her employer last week and then attempted suicide -- the Labor agency treated her like crap, according to the New Lens piece. A horrible case, and the ugly news reporting in Taiwan disgusted many of us reading it. Liberty Times appeared to imply that the terrible thing about the case was what it did to the country's image (丟臉丟到國外 Lost face abroad!), and put up images from a video of the rape that the poor woman managed to shoot.
The labor brokers -- who are they? Well, the last legislator to attempt to make changes received death threats from gangsters. The government needs to clean that mess up, eliminate the brokers, and set up a government run program.
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Daily Links:
- The Chinese once again flew planes through the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and Phils.
- NPR on Kinmen and its dilemmas. Kinmen and Matsu are probably the only places where the ROC actually exists in the minds of the residents.
- Will someone tell the NPP that US one China policy does not include Taiwan in China? *sigh*
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9 comments:
I heard that NPR thing, and was prepared to be pissed off but actually it was pretty well-done except for pronouncing it Kinmen rather than Jinmen because OF STUPID Ks INSTEAD OF Js IN INFERIOR ROMANIZATION SYSTEMS FFS.
As for the tour groups, the KMT, the protesters and China don't seem to get that a.) nobody else actually wanted the tour groups and b.) the tourism industry existed before they came, and Taiwan was a better place to visit. The tourism industry will therefore survive. It's not like it didn't exist before they started overcrowding the place.
My cousin who used to be in the Taiwan army was stationed in Kinmen. He was pleased to find that the Kinmen people speak his language and exclaimed to a group of locals "hey, you guys speak Taiwanese too! To which the locals scolded him "we don't speak Taiwanese, you speak Kinmenese!"
"with former national policy adviser Wu Li-pei (吳澧培) recently criticizing President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) appointment of David Lee (李大維) — a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which has temporarily suspended his membership — as minister of foreign affairs." LOL. Tsai and the new DPP getting slapped by a Chen Shui Bian's crony from the old DPP. The old guard is not going down without a fight.
A bookkeeping is in demand for stupid legal opinions coming out of the New Power Party.
1. Chairman Huang demanded ROC to show off sovereignty on Taiping Island (to the US).
2. Chairman Huang thought US One-China Policy includes Taiwan.
Someone please send Legislator Huang, and his NPPers, to Dr. Roger Lin. With reasonable sums of fee, Taiwan Civil Government will educate them well on laws of international war.
I visited Jinmen before it was widely open to mainland tourists (pre-Ma) and then revisited it again last year. The perception of the locals I spoke with was that the mainland tourists were in some ways ruining the island's tranquil nature.
I also noticed that a lot of the traditional houses and other architecture in the villages that had been so carefully maintained during my first visit had gone commercial to cater to mainland tourists and yet, despite the money flowing in, had deferred maintenance issues like peeling paint and general erosion of the structure.
It seems as if the choice is much more binary than some of the locals interviewed in the NPR piece would like to think: they can try to limit mainlanders and preserve the culture and the quality of the island or they can continue opening more and more to mainland tourists, enjoy the cash grab, and let the place atrophy.
"With reasonable sums of fee, Taiwan Civil Government will educate them well on laws of international war."
LOL, that is a good one.
@Anon re "mainland tourists": what is the real "mainland" to Kinmen, is it really China as you perhaps assume, or maybe is it rather Taiwan (the island) for being the "mainland" of the de facto country? Why not be clear and simply state "Chinese tourists" instead - this term also fits e.g. the residents of Hainan, which obviously does not belong to any "mainland".
@Anon
Because this is a blog message board and I wrote the message quickly. I suspect that 99.9% of the readers understood that the reference was to Chinese tourists since those are the tourists profiled in the piece to which I was responding and, if we're not being silly about it, the only tourists to which the observation would make sense, given the facts on the ground. Sorry to leave you confused.
Note the tour bus operators crying the loudest are going to be the same ones that refused to take students and DPP supporters up to Taipei during the Sunflower occupation and various pan-Green rallies.
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