Xiamen forum reveals state of tourism between mainland China and Taiwan

However, the ferry is now a popular option for Taiwan residents to travel to the mainland because only a small selection of cross-strait flights have resumed to date.

According to Taipei’s Ministry of the Interior, fewer than 730,000 Taiwanese – just 37 per cent of the number in 2019 – travelled by boat from Quemoy to Xiamen and Quanzhou, another Fujian port city, last year.

The forum – which Beijing calls a “people-to-people exchange platform” but Taipei calls a “united front tool” – has more than 50 side events, including some related to grass-roots governance, youth exchanges and cultural and economic exchanges. Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office estimated on Wednesday that more than 7,000 Taiwanese would attend.

Huang said the suspension was “hurting ordinary people, not the [Taiwan] government”.

The tariff cuts were originally made under the Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), the only trade agreement between the mainland and Taiwan. The June suspension was part of Beijing’s response to what it called the “separatist” inauguration by the new Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te.

Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China, to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the United States, do not recognise the island as an independent state. However, Washington is opposed to any attempt to take Taiwan by force and is committed to arming it.

Huang, who left Xiamen by ferry on Sunday, said his business on the mainland was “stuck” after 2016 when Lai’s predecessor Tsai Ing-wen was in office.

Tsai, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), refused to recognise the 1992 consensus, an understanding that there is only one China but that each side has its own interpretation of what that means. Beijing sees the consensus as the basis for cross-strait relations.

Huang was worried that new political tensions after Lai’s election would again affect his business, and he must return to the mainland for its huge market of semiconductor-related products.

Fujian is immediately west of the Taiwan Strait and is the closest part of the mainland to Taiwan, both geographically and culturally.

Various supporting measures were then announced, including the provision that any Taiwanese citizen travelling from Quemoy to the mainland could apply online for a document known as a compatriot permit and collect it on arrival in the province.

But, according to some Taiwanese who regularly travel between the two sides via Quemoy and those who have long lived in Fujian, the impact of the new measures has been limited.

One man from Taiwan’s Taichung city who runs a business in Xiamen said he had lived on the mainland for a long time – enjoying improvements to his living experience over the years – before the new integration policy was introduced, so the measures had brought him “very limited” convenience.

But he said he occasionally took a boat to Quemoy to buy food and household goods because he was “still not used to the mainland’s food and living habits”.

Similarly, a Taiwanese man who travelled from Quemoy to Fujian on Sunday said he had lived in Zhangzhou, a city near Xiamen, for more than 30 years. He said the new measures mainly benefited people from Taiwan who had not yet visited the mainland, not people like himself who were almost “a local”.

A taxi driver who regularly picks up passengers at Wutong port said he had noticed far fewer Taiwanese entering Xiamen through the port than before the pandemic.

His customers were now mainly people visiting relatives, rather than Taiwanese businesspeople who used to be “generous and give tips”, or Taiwanese young people coming to the mainland for the first time, as the integration plan had aimed to do, the driver said.

Travel agents at the port made similar observations. They said Wutong pier was no longer busy because cross-strait travel was still not fully open. Mainland Chinese tourists need permission from both the mainland and Taiwan authorities to visit the island.

In 2008, after Ma Ying-jeou of the pro-Beijing Kuomintang (KMT) came to power, a deal allowed group tours to operate on the mainland and in Taiwan. In 2011, Beijing for the first time allowed individual tourists from some mainland cities to visit Taiwan.

In 2019, Beijing cancelled individual travel to Taiwan, and in 2020, amid the pandemic, Taiwan suspended all visitor arrivals and Beijing suspended all group travel.

In April, Beijing allowed the first mainland tourists – limited to group tours from Fujian – to travel to the Matsu islands, a Taipei-controlled territory 20km (12.4 miles) from Fujian’s provincial capital Fuzhou.

Taipei had planned to allow group tours to visit the mainland, but the plan was shelved in February after Beijing adjusted civil aviation routes near the sensitive middle line of the Taiwan Strait.

In Xiamen during the forum, both participants and Taiwanese living there seemed reluctant to comment on cross-strait politics.

At a women’s forum on Saturday afternoon, one participant said: “I am very satisfied with the arrangements for the forum and deeply proud of the mainland’s development of national strength”.

A retired couple from Taipei declined to share their feelings of Taiwan’s new leadership with the South China Morning Post, saying only that “everything is good on the mainland”.

Still, some issued implicit warnings.