One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism

ONE CHINA, MANY TAIWANS

The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism

Ian Rowen

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

For Asher Zeno and his many worlds

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1. How Taiwan Became an Exceptional Territory

2. The Rise of Cross-Strait Travel and Tourism

3. Taiwan as Tourist Heterotopia

4. Circling Taiwan, Chinese Tour-Group Style

5. The Varieties of Independent Tourist Experience

6. Waves of Tourists, Waves of Protest, and the End of One China

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

Map 0.1. Map of Taiwan and surrounds

Figure I.1. Changing of the guards at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Taipei

Figure 3.1. Indigenous-themed clothing priced in Chinese currency, Kenting

Figure 3.2. Shanghai airport terminal display with Int’l & Hongkong/ Macau/Taiwan

Figure 3.3. Taipei Songshan Airport, international departures board

Figure 3.4. Images of Taiwan and Sun Moon Lake inside the PRC passport

Figure 3.5. Taiwan independence and pro-China groups demonstrating at the Taipei 101 building entrance

Figure 3.6. Falun Gong demonstrators outside the National Palace Museum, Taipei

Acknowledgments

This book owes immeasurably to the keen and generous eyes of Scott Writer, Lev Nachman, and Lauren Dickey, who each looked over the full manuscript at various stages of completion, sometimes more than once, and to Daniel Kao for his beautiful map of Taiwan. Painstakingly thorough reviews from Jenny Chio and Marc Moskowitz and two more anonymous referee reports greatly strengthened the manuscript. Emily Yeh, John O’Loughlin, and especially Tim Oakes were instrumental to the development of this work. Thanks are due as well to Catherine Chou, Shu-mei Huang, Chris Horton, Jamie Rowen, and Max Farrell, who kindly read portions of the manuscript and offered helpful comments. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Yang Yang, Amelia Schubert, Sam Tynen, and Tan Shi Ying for help with finding sources.

My fieldwork and writing benefited immensely from my time affiliated at Academia Sinica in Taipei, including the gracious hosting of Maukuei Chang at the Institute of Sociology and Peng Jen-yu at the Institute of Ethnology. Field research was supported by the Fulbright Commission and Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, the US National Science Foundation, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and the University of Colorado Boulder Geography Department. Ideas were further refined during a delightful summer as a visiting scholar at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan at Tübingen University and in countless conferences and workshops. I thank Gunther Schubert, Dafydd Fell, and other Taiwan studies colleagues for their hospitality and support.

Portions of chapter 6 appeared in Chinese Tourism as Trigger and Target of the Sunflower and Umbrella Movements in the 2020 book Sunflowers and Umbrellas: Social Movements, Expressive Practices, and Political Culture in Taiwan and Hong Kong, edited by Thomas Gold and Sebastian Veg, published by the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in Touring in Heterotopia: Travel, Sovereignty, and Exceptional Spaces in Taiwan and China in Asian Anthropology 16 (1), published in 2017.

Thanks are owed to my editor Jim Lance for seeing the book through with the press and to Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for use of the balance of my start-up research funds to support open-access electronic publication of this book.

Finally, thanks to Guy Rubin at Imperial Tours in Beijing for a yearlong whirlwind tour of the travel industry capped by excellent career advice, and to Titi for seeing the book through with my psyche.

Abbreviations

Note on Transliteration

Taiwan’s place and personal names continue to be romanized in dazzlingly inconsistent ways, reflecting and reproducing the cultural tensions traced in this book. When I first resided in Taipei in 2001, a walk north from National Taiwan University took me past signs for Xinsheng S. Road, Hsin-sheng S. Road, and Shin-sheng S. Road, all on the same road. Even today, years after China’s standard Hanyu Pinyin was adopted by Taipei City under the leadership of then mayor Ma Ying-jeou, it is still common to see the same places, persons, or products written differently depending on where one stands.

In general, this book uses the most prevalent romanization for places within Taiwan (i.e., Taitung, not Taidong), while Hanyu Pinyin is used for mainland Chinese place-names. Personal names of well-known figures are written in whatever romanization appears most commonly in news reports or official documents. My named informants are written in their preferred romanization. For pseudonymous informants, Hanyu Pinyin is used if they are from China, and a quasi–Wade Giles spelling is used if they are from Taiwan. For Chinese-language words with polysemic or questionable English glosses, Hanyu Pinyin is included in parentheses for additional clarity.

MAP 0.1. Map of Taiwan and surrounds.

INTRODUCTION

In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pointed thousands of missiles toward Taiwan, it started sending millions of tourists the same way. The tourists were welcomed by a travel industry eager for new sources of revenue as well as by President Ma Ying-jeou, who was elected earlier that year. President Ma claimed that the opening would strengthen the economy and improve Taiwan’s relations with what he called mainland China. The tourists, said Ma’s administration, might return home with a positive impression of Taiwan’s democracy, which would lead to mutual understanding and maybe even political reconciliation. Still, despite the growing flow of leisure travelers and the social, economic, and political connections that they facilitated, citizens and officials on both sides of the Taiwan Strait did not quite agree on the cultural character or spatial definition of the territories they were traveling between. It turned out that tourism deepened the difference.

As far as most Chinese tourists were concerned, they were traveling in a part of China, culturally familiar if undeniably distinct politically. Indeed, Taiwan, an archipelago of twenty-three million people, with the western shore of its main island about 160 kilometers away across a heavily militarized strait, was listed as a province on all PRC maps and passports. As for Chinese authorities, the ultimate goal of all cross-strait policy, including tourism, was political control and ultimately annexation—euphemistically referred to as unification and defined as a national core interest. Some China-friendly leaders in Taiwan also hoped for territorial unification, even if they had a different vision of what that future China would look like and how it would be governed.

However, many people in Taiwan had a different idea—that these mainland guests (lu ke), as they called them, were entering a different country entirely, where they were welcome to spend their money, have a good time, mind their own business, and then go home. For those concerned about PRC irredentism, tourism looked like another one of several weapons aimed at Taiwan’s sovereignty. As it happened, at the same time that cross-strait tourism accelerated, so did Taiwanese national identification and pro-independence sentiment, leading to unprecedented protests and electoral shifts against PRC-friendly politicians.

A potential for tension should have been clear, for 2008 was not the first time that Taiwan had received a rapid influx of arrivals from China. Sixty-odd years earlier, at the close of World War II, Taiwan was overwhelmed by weary and desperate soldiers serving the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), who were then retreating from the military advance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These soldiers and the KMT-dominated state apparatus they propped up, the Republic of China (ROC), occupied Taiwan in 1945 with the support of the United States after imperial Japan was forced to end its half century of colonization. Many Taiwanese saw the military men as uncouth and unhygienic (Kerr 1965), qualities not so dissimilar from those later attributed to twenty-first-century tourists. But unlike today’s visitors, these soldiers had nowhere to return to after the CCP consolidated its control and established the PRC in Beijing. They instead were pressed to enforce the repressive and often murderous rule of the émigré ROC in Taiwan and sometimes also suffered violence themselves under the authoritarian KMT regime (Yang 2020). Even after the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwanese have continued to live under the ever-present threat of a new Chinese military invasion, this time from the PRC, whose leaders have pledged to eventually reunify Taiwan by any means necessary.

Subtly written into the practice of tourism, then, amid the rhetoric of reconciliation, was the recapitulation of a past military occupation and the foreshadowing of a future assault. Such semiotic excess evokes Jacques Derrida’s meditation on the etymological entwinement and transmutable tension between hospitality and hostility, in which he suggests that for the invited guest as much as for the visitor, the crossing of the threshold always remains a transgressive step (2000, 75).

Taiwan’s thresholds are tense, tangled, and constructed through a series of transgressions. Here, tourism animates guests, hosts, and guides in a turbulent dance of difference and identity, making plain that travel is no mere leisure activity. Rather, it is a stage for struggle over ethnic identity and national borders, a geopolitical instrument and event that performs and transforms state territory.

Tourism, I will demonstrate, has been one of several strategies aimed at achieving the political control of Taiwan for the PRC. But how has it worked in practice? And what does this case have to say to the claims of many tourism scholars and industry and political leaders that tourism can promote peace and mutual understanding? This book argues that contrary to the PRC’s efforts to incorporate Taiwan as part of an undivided One China, tourism actually aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination.

In the process, Taiwan’s staging of state sovereignty bifurcated into what could be described as two Taiwans—the Taiwan performed as a part of China for group tourists versus the Taiwan experienced as a site of everyday life by local residents and some independent tourists. The split corresponded with a growing fissure of the domestic political economy, amplifying a conflict between those business, civil society, and state actors that had an interest in sustaining a PRC-oriented tourist industry and those that did not. These tourism-inflected two Taiwans are among the most vivid manifestations of inconsistent nationalisms spanning a territory that was already realizing a distinct, and distinctively inclusive, subjectivity. Indeed, Taiwan’s identity is increasingly predicated on a pluralistic civic nationalism in which not just one or two but many Taiwans coexist more or less comfortably, even as it is existentially threatened.

Although the transformations of Taiwan and China are the focus of this study, attention to their unusual features can illustrate the role of everyday practices—such as the use of national flags, maps, names, and travel permits—in the conduct of tourism and the production of political spaces elsewhere. Looking at everyday practices of state administration and interpersonal encounter in contested states sheds light on the peculiarity of normative sovereignties more generally (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Friedman 2015; Mälksoo 2012).

Likewise, looking at exceptional and even world-shattering moments can shed light on peculiar practices long taken for granted. By traveling along such spatial and temporal edges of sovereignty, one can witness the instability of the center—in this case, the notion of exclusive state territory, an elusive yet persistent phantasm that haunts the gaps and fissures of the world system, its incomplete suture to international representative bodies like the United Nations rupturing violently into view through the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which imploded global mobility and illuminated the geopolitical stakes of tourism.

Tourism and Territory

This is all just for show! shouted a Chinese tourist during the routine changing of the guards at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei, a scene pictured in figure I.1. I observed him complain loudly to whoever would listen before he stormed outside. He was not wrong. Of course, the military guards, wearing starched uniforms and marching with bayonets in precisely timed drills, were giving a show. The monument, with its grandiose, if now slightly dilapidated, facade and gigantic statue of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the ROC, was designed for show. Likewise, the tourist’s loud public dismissal was a kind of show. But blatant theatricality makes such phenomena no less powerful or productive—these phenomena are powerful and productive precisely because they are performances. The performance with both the soldiers and the tourist, like the tourist’s prior encounter with a border guard on his arrival to Taiwan and his application for a travel permit to enter Taiwan in the first place, produced the tourist and the toured as national subjects. In so doing, it produced, reproduced, and troubled the state and interstate system.¹ The unsettling and uncanny aspects of such spaces and practices point not only to the fragility of contested states but also to the general instability of states and state subjects, which require constant work to maintain.

FIGURE I.1. Changing of the guards at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Taipei.

Although cross-strait tourism may seem in many ways to be an extraordinary case, contoured as it is by clashing territorial claims, it is precisely its extraordinariness that makes it valuable for building theory about the geopolitics of tourism in general. So much is taken for granted in the scholarship and practice of tourism that the study of an extraordinary situation may uncover what, through repetition, has come to seem ordinary—a world split into nation-states with mutually exclusive territories, a global mobility regime of visas and passports, of embassies and border guards, and so on—but which is in fact an unlikely and unstable configuration of spaces, bodies, and practices.

Pandemic punctuations notwithstanding, millions of tourists cross borders every year. Passports in hand, these tourists act as the citizen-subjects of the various nation-states of the world. They travel for any number of reasons. When they cross borders from their own country into another and then return home, they not only carry memories and souvenirs—they, along with border agents and airlines, travel agents and tour operators, are performing, effectively enacting, and potentially transforming the borders that they are crossing and the territories that they are traversing.

The central conceptual proposition of this book is that tourism performs and can transform state territory. This argument is informed by Michel Foucault’s analytics of government, which attends to points of contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self (Foucault 1988, 17). These social and political technologies produce temporarily durable but never finished subjects and objects (Foucault 2009; Lemke 2007; Rose and Miller 2012). Seen this way, states and citizens are not a priori political agents, and territories are not passive spatial containers, but rather are effects of power-laden relationships—always-already in a state of flux, of becoming, of change, contradiction, rupture, and reformation (Mitchell 1991; Abrams 1988). To put the point concisely, tourism can and should be theorized as a technology of state territorialization.

What does it mean to perform state territory, and how might tourism transform it? Let us begin with territory, which is better conceived as an act or practice rather than an object or physical space (Brighenti 2010, 53). I treat territory as a political practice and pattern of relations that names, claims, calculates and bounds space. More specifically, I use state territorialization to refer to the particular practices by which space is rendered or configured as belonging to and bounded by a collective actor imagined as a particular state, in whose name individuals are interpellated (implicitly or explicitly) as citizens or subjects, aliens or foreigners, and which is imagined as the source of central political authority for a national territory (Painter 2006, 758). However this collective actor is imagined, the practices, mechanisms and institutions through which processes of interpellation take place are very real and often violent (758).

Territories acquire spatial definition through the production and reproduction of borders, which establish constitutive divisions between what is inside and what is outside. These borders are not simply lines on a map, but social and discursive practices that take place in time (Paasi 1998). To name the processes by which people become attached to particular state or national territories, I take the term territorial socialization from the political geographer David Newman (1999), who has observed that places just outside effective administrative borders but still within other imagined boundaries often become cast as crucial to the integrity of a territorial unit, amplifying potential for physical and symbolic conflict.

Boundaries are both legitimated and contested in cultural, civic, ethnic, biological, and other terms that extract and enforce singular identities from a multiplicity of possibilities. Among the most persistent of these formations has been the nation, succinctly defined by Benedict Anderson (2006) as an imagined political community, on whose behalf the modern territorial state claims a basis for legitimacy. With most of contemporary global space represented and subdivided such that every putative nation is implied to have a state territorial roof (Gellner 1983), state territory in this normative sense is the coordinate space occupied by a nation-state … with each piece a part of one or another nation-state’s territory (Wainwright and Robertson 2003, 201). Of course, the real world is far messier, with Taiwan as a case in point.

State sovereignty and national citizenship are enacted whenever a traveler proffers a passport and submits to the authority of a border guard. In this way, the borders of the nation-state are socially produced and reproduced, and sometimes transgressed and transformed, when they are crossed by mobile actors, including tourists and migrants (Cresswell 2010; Richardson 2013; Salter 2013; Sheller and Urry 2006).

Territorial socialization occurs inside borders as well, during moments of everyday life in which routine and even banal performances of nation, state, and region take place. Displayed in museums and monuments, inscribed into maps and other cartographic devices, representations of borders circulate in print, speech, and social media. They appear in books and newspapers, and in shows and at sites, often popular with tourists, where state and national heroes are celebrated and collective yet selective memory transmutes to myth (Balibar 2002; Paasi 1998, 2000; Billig 1995).

Performing Guests and Hosts

If territoriality pivots on the constitutive distinction between inside and outside, tourism theory pivots on the constitutive distinction between guest and host. The guest received the spotlight in the groundbreaking analysis of Dean MacCannell (1976), who posited that the tourist was emblematic of the modern subject’s search for meaning and authenticity. Subsequent contributions, including the influential edited book Hosts and Guests (Smith 1977), examined both sides of the equation by attending to tourism’s impacts on receiving areas and communities. Extending these insights to examine tourism’s effects on ways of sensing and knowing, John Urry’s later work on the tourist gaze, loosely following Foucault, suggested that tourism generated a distinctive way to make the world legible for tourists and everyone they implicate, with potentially limitless effects (Urry and Larsen 2011).

These early works tend to treat the tourist as a typical, or even the quintessential, modern subject in search of a sense of authenticity and difference from home. Although they provide useful reference points for the present case, their empirical basis in Euro-American leisure tourism limits their geographical scope and theoretical purchase. Later waves of tourism research by Asian and Asia-focused scholars, inspired in part by postcolonial and post-structural theory, both built on and pushed back against these conceptual foundations to argue that tourism elsewhere can operate, and therefore needs to be theorized, in radically different ways (Winter, Teo, and Chang 2009; Edensor 2008; Teo and Leong 2006; T. Chang 2021; Adams 2021).

China received a significant amount of this scholarly attention due both to the superlative size of its market as well as the theoretical provocations it provides. After considering how the Chinese party-state has used tourism to support foreign policy aims (Richter 1983a), to articulate a sense of modernity (Oakes 1998), and to project authority over cultural interpretation, it becomes difficult to characterize tourism primarily as a search for meaning by adrift modern subjects. Speaking directly back to earlier such theories, Pál Nyíri (2006, 2010) has argued that unlike the idealized Western tourist in search of the exotic, many Chinese travelers are not necessarily interested in pursuing an experience of cultural authenticity or difference—in many cases, it is actually a space of identification and familiarity that is desired by visitors and produced by the tourism industry and state agencies that cater to them.

Studies of ethnic tourism in China’s diverse southwestern regions offer suggestive hints for how to more carefully consider tourism’s capacity to produce spaces and practices of identification and difference. Such ethnographies emerged together with other studies of social difference, including work on the stereotyping of minority populations as gendered, fetishized, disliked, backward, harmless, or nearly indistinguishable from the dominant Han majority, who relationally construct themselves in opposition as rational and modern subjects (Blum 2001). Scholars observed that many such quasi-colonial tropes and stereotypes were in turn incorporated into the products and landscapes, both physical and imaginary, of ethnic tourism (Schein 2000; Oakes 1998; Chio 2014). These theoretically sophisticated studies are as important for what they can anticipate about Chinese tourism to Taiwan as for what they cannot account for: the peculiar cross-strait case in which Han Chinese guests identify with Taiwanese hosts as fellow ethnonational subjects, albeit under a distinct political regime they are themselves implicated in