Chinese Tourists Deluge Taiwan

It got off to a slow start, but a long-awaited travel agreement between China and Taiwan, forged last summer, has finally yielded a huge bump in mainland tourists traveling to the island.

That’s great news for Taiwan’s struggling economy, but Taipei’s National Palace Museum—home to the world’s finest collection of Chinese art, much of it taken from the mainland during the Chinese civil war—is overwhelmed. Some 63,000 mainland Chinese visited the museum in March, prompting new policies on crowd control and enforcing silence among visitors, along with plans to expand and renovate parts of the building.

Chinese are eager to see the museum because of the controversial history of its collection, viewed as “stolen,” from Beijing’s perspective. But they’re also likely to get a political eye-opener as they wait in line on the museum’s expansive front steps. It’s a favorite spot for the Falun Gong to set up shop, illustrating, quite nicely in my view, what a Chinese democracy looks like.

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved