Chapter 3. Cross-Taiwan Strait Relations in Retrospect
3.3. Evidence of Cross-Strait Integration
3.3.2. Tourism and Cultural Links
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candidates, as shown in Chen Shui-bian’s 2000 and 2004 elections and the variety of Taishang voices that both supported and opposed him.57
In fact, many businesspeople do not openly discuss Taiwan’s politics at all for fear of backlash in both China and Taiwan.58 Rather than building bridges of understanding between the people of Taiwan and China, the Taishang have purposefully avoided speaking on politics. This constitutes a challenge for the formation of linkage
communities, showing that interactions between businesspeople in China and Taiwan are not necessarily facilitating political understanding on either side or uniting everyone within a linkage community with the same point of view. At present, the linkage
community of Taishang in the Chinese mainland have not established a political agenda that makes them a predictable voting bloc in Taiwan. While deepening economic interactions between China and Taiwan have created a system of interdependence that protects against drastic changes in the political status quo, these interactions will face challenges in spilling over to the political sphere.
3.3.2. Tourism and Cultural Links
Research on the culture and tourism side of cross-strait integration and community formation remains relatively uncommon compared to the business and economic side. A 1999 review of social and cultural contacts across the Taiwan Strait found that cross-strait exchange from mainland China to Taiwan mainly took the form of academic conferences, presentations, joint research ventures, and public performances in the performing arts.59 However, these cooperative efforts were vulnerable to changes in the cross-strait political and security relationship.60
As the political environment between China and Taiwan changes, cultural
exchanges may expand or shrink depending on the agenda of those in power. While both the KMT and DPP have shifted toward the center preference of keeping the cross-strait status quo, each party’s identity has influenced the growth of cross-strait interactions.61 Wei and Lai create an identity-rationality framework to explain the differing approaches
57 Murray Scot Tanner, op. cit., p. 116-117.
58 Murray Scot Tanner, op. cit., p. 105.
59 Wen-Hui Tsai, “Taiwan-mainland China Relations: Cultural and Other Exchanges and Cooperation,” in Winston L. Yang and Deborah A. Brown, eds. Across the Taiwan Strait: Exchanges, Conflicts, and Negotiations, (Jamaica, NY: Center of Asian Studies, St. John’s University, 1999), p. 113.
60 Wen-Hui Tsai, op. cit., p. 119.
61 Chin-hao Huang and Patrick James, “Blue, Green, or Aquamarine? Taiwan and the Status Quo Preference in Cross-Strait Relations,” China Quarterly 219 (2014), 670-692.
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to cross-strait policy undertaken by DPP and KMT administrations. The KMT and DPP use different rationales for expanding or limiting cross-strait integration depending on their identity orientation. Wei and Lai argue that the DPP’s independence-minded identity has led to DPP administrations limiting cross-strait exchanges during times of stability and expanding them when tensions rise. During cross-strait crises in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Taiwan-identifying administrations in the ROC expanded educational and cultural exchanges with the Mainland to ease tensions. On the other hand, the KMT, in accordance with their integration-minded identity, has expanded cross-strait integration policies when relations with China are stable and has limited them in times of cross-strait tension.62 This framework illustrates that the volume of cultural and educational
exchanges remain sensitive to the cross-strait policy environment, unlike Taiwanese business community that was able to find ways into China despite restrictive policies in Taiwan.
In tourism, the PRC has been open to Taiwanese tourists in China since the opening of travel across the Taiwan Strait, while tourism from mainland China to Taiwan opened only in 2008.63 While cross-strait tourists constitute a linkage community between China and Taiwan, their emotional connection to each other appears weaker. J.J. Zhang’s 2013 study of travelers’ behaviors while traversing through China and Taiwan’s airports found that Taiwanese visitors do not necessarily identify with the mainland: while interviewees could appear ambivalent about the political situation between China and Taiwan, they still viewed a difference between the two places.64 Regarding Chinese tourists in Taiwan, Rowen’s 2014 study found that the PRC is able to reach into Taiwan’s tourism industry in the form of group tours to influence a PRC tourist’s experience of Taiwan as a part of China.65 While this “territorialization” is effective on PRC visitors to Taiwan, the interaction of PRC tourists with Taiwanese locals has not necessarily
produced the shared empathy or sensitivity toward each other that the linkage community framework posits.
62 Chi-hung Wei and Christina J. Lai, “Identities, Rationality and Taiwan’s China Policy: The Dynamics of Cross-Strait Exchanges,” Asian Studies Review 41:1 (2017), pp. 139, 144.
63 Min-Hua Chiang, “Tourism Development Across the Taiwan Strait,” East Asia, vol. 29, 2012, pp. 236, 239.
64 J.J. Zhang, “Borders on the Move: Cross-Strait Tourists’ Material Moments on ‘The Other Side’ in the Midst of Rapprochement between China and Taiwan,” Geoforum, vol. 48 2013, p. 95.
65 Ian Rowen, “Tourism as a Territorial Strategy: The Case of China and Taiwan,” Annals of Tourism Research vol. 46, 2014, pp. 65-66.
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This section has highlighted that while integration and linkage communities in the form of cross-strait business and cultural interactions have grown, people-to-people ties between Taiwan and China have yet to create an environment in which people identify politically with each other and want a change in Taiwan’s political status quo. This chapter has further placed the current status of China and Taiwan’s political relationship within a historical and theoretical context of integration between divided nations.
Considering the salient Taiwanese identity developing in Taiwan and preference for the political status quo, the connections at the “low politics” level of economic and cultural ties have yet to produce spillover into goodwill at the level of governmental relations. The following chapter examines the development of Taiwan and China’s higher education systems as well as current evidence and scholarship on student exchanges in higher education across the Taiwan Strait.