Taibo City, Taiwan
The Jadeite Cabbage, an exquisite 19th-century jade carving made to look like a head of Chinese cabbage (I’m not really doing it justice), is essentially the Mona Lisa of Chinese art. I know this because when I visited the National Palace Museum in Taipei a few years back, I could barely see the thing. The darkened room the cabbage was sequestered in was mobbed, with scores of tourists jostling just to get a glimpse (and more important, a blurry, partially obscured photograph) of the gleaming work. Most of the excited tourists—I’d estimate up to three-quarters—hailed from the Chinese mainland.
What a difference three years makes. The cabbage is currently on display at the southern branch of the National Palace Museum in Taibo, a 90-minute high-speed train ride from Taipei. On a visit there, I practically had my run of the place. Nary a Chinese tour group—easily spottable, with their flag-holding tour guides—was in sight. While this is partially because the southern branch of the Palace Museum draws fewer guests than the main branch in Taipei, that’s not the whole story.
Mainland tourism to Taiwan has fallen off a cliff this year—Taiwanese government data suggest a 30 percent year-over-year fall in visits, down from the more than four million Chinese who made the cross-strait trip in 2015. It’s causing serious economic hardship for many: About 10,000 Taiwanese employed in the tourism sector marched in Taipei in mid-September, demanding a fix.
It’s politics, not a newfound aversion to Taiwan’s gorgeous tropical scenery, that explains the plunge. In May, Taiwan inaugurated a new president, a 60-year-old former law professor named Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai, Taiwan’s first female leader, hails from the Democratic Progressive party (DPP), the ideological home of those Taiwanese who support formally declaring independence from mainland China. She replaced a Kuomintang party member, Ma Ying-jeou, who was notable for the warm relations he pursued with Beijing. Under Ma’s leadership, cross-strait trade and tourism flourished. (Mainland China is now Taiwan’s largest trading partner.) Ma even met with Chinese president Xi Jinping, the first time that Beijing’s and Taipei’s leaders had met since the conclusion of the Chinese civil war in 1949. To Beijing’s delight, Ma accepted the so-called 1992 Consensus, which holds that Taiwan and mainland China are one indivisible territory.
While Tsai was elected in large part due to domestic concerns—the economy slowed markedly in the final years of Ma’s term and income inequality widened—Beijing took her election rather personally. Mainland China cut off official contact with the Taiwanese government shortly after Tsai’s inauguration. Beijing also pressured local tour operators to scuttle Taiwan tours. (About half of Chinese tourists to Taiwan travel through package tours.) All this despite the fact that Tsai has been nothing if not cautious; she has not called for independence. Indeed, in her May 20 inaugural address, the new president allowed that the slow détente of the last couple of decades has had benefits for both sides of the strait. “Over 20 years of interactions and negotiations across the strait have enabled and accumulated outcomes which both sides must collectively cherish and sustain,” she said. Given that a big part of Tsai’s political base is very hostile to China (I spoke with several DPP partisans who say they feel no connection to the mainland whatsoever), her stance was notably conciliatory.
Still, that wasn’t enough to placate Xi Jinping’s hardline government in Beijing. Consider the Communists’ latest bit of pettiness. From late September to early October, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) will hold its triennial conference in Montreal. It’s a largely technical conference—aviation authorities from dozens of countries will hammer out issues pertaining to airline safety, security, environmental impact, and the like. But because ICAO is a U.N. body, and Taiwan is not a U.N. member state, the island’s aviation authority is not on the invite list. In 2013, however, Taiwan was allowed to attend as a guest. Not this year. ICAO’s secretary general is Chinese, and the body has not even responded to Taiwan’s written request to attend again as a mere observer.
Local authorities are apoplectic at the snub. At a meeting in Taipei at Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration, a dozen aviation officials stressed that the blockage from ICAO is an unnecessary impediment to safety and efficiency—the country’s airlines will have to rely on secondhand accounts of what gets discussed at ICAO. (Though, perhaps because they knew I was to fly home soon, they simultaneously stressed that Taiwanese aviation is perfectly safe.) At bottom, the ICAO issue represents Beijing’s basic lack of respect for Taiwan.
In the meantime, Taiwan is looking elsewhere, trying to reduce its dependence on China. The Tsai government has inaugurated a “New Southbound Policy” designed to increase trade with India and Southeast Asian nations. The sensible idea is that Taiwan has put too many of its eggs in the China basket; fully 40 percent of its exports are sent to China and Hong Kong. Even were Beijing a friendly regime, it’s dangerous to rely that much on one economy. The Taiwanese government is also promoting tourism from other Asian countries, including South Korea and Thailand. (It recently introduced visa-free travel for Thais.) Indeed, some suggest that the fall-off in Chinese tourism could spur Taiwan to upgrade its service offerings and attract a more moneyed class of tourist.
If nothing else, there’s never been a better time to see the Jadeite Cabbage.
Ethan Epstein, associate editor of The Weekly Standard, traveled as a guest of the Taiwanese ministry of foreign affairs.
