Taiwan tourists make comeback

MANILA, Philippines–Taiwanese tourists are beginning to return to the Philippines after a slump following the shooting of a Taiwanese fisherman in the country’s north in 2013.

Taipei’s representative in Manila hopes the uptick would lead to a full restoration of ties between the two sides.

Gary Song-Huann Lin, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (Teco) representative in Manila, said his agency hoped to encourage greater two-way travel between Taiwan and the Philippines because the close neighbors still “don’t know each other.”

Teco is the local counterpart of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office (Meco) in Taipei, which oversee Philippine-Taiwan relations. The Philippines has a one-China policy that precludes official diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

“We are very close neighbors and the travel distance is very short. The two [sides] unfortunately don’t visit each other, we don’t know each other. So my role is to build a bridge, promote two-way travel… We’d like to encourage the two peoples to visit each other,” Lin told reporters on the sidelines of a tourism promotion event held by Teco in Manila on Wednesday night.

Last year, 133,583 Taiwanese visited the country, a 3.26-percent increase over the number of tourists the prior year.

Lin hopes to raise the number of Taiwanese tourists to 200,000, closer to the visitor figures before the May 9, 2013, shooting of Taiwanese fisherman Hong Shi Cheng by Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) personnel at Balintang Channel, in Philippine waters but close to the border with Taiwan.

Taiwan is the seventh-largest tourist source for the Philippines, Lin said.

Human touch in relations

Meanwhile, Filipino travelers to Taiwan numbered 136,978 last year, making the Philippines the fifth-largest tourist source for Taiwan among Southeast Asian nations, he said.

“[These figures] show tourism interaction is booming and, more importantly, spell a stroke of human touch in the people-to-people relations between [the two sides],” said Lin in his remarks at the event.

The Teco representative conceded that the shooting incident, in which the PCG personnel fired on Hong’s fishing boat after it allegedly refused to stop, had discouraged Taiwanese travel to the Philippines.

“Basically it is psychological sentiment. Because the shooting itself, although it’s very sad, a tragic incident, a lot of people just read through the media, they don’t know whether Filipinos are really friendly or not,” Lin said.

“So they considered that the Philippines seemed not very friendly to people. So that sent a very negative signal to Taiwan. So this is why we try to restore the mutual understanding,” said Lin.

Eight Philippine Coast Guard personnel are on trial for the shooting. President Aquino apologized to Taiwan a week after the incident amid public outrage on the island-state and its threat of economic sanctions.