中国のエコノミック・ステイトクラフトと台湾

――「恵台政策」における観光客の送り出しの事例分析――

抄録

This article considers the effects of China’s economic statecraft, conducting a case study of the tourism policy of sending out mainland Chinese tourists to Taiwan in China’s “Favor-Granting policies.” The Favor-Granting policies can be regarded as a particular type of economic statecraft, one which intends to change the behavior and policies of another country by providing economic benefits.

Pursuing the strategic end of the “Peaceful Unification” with Taiwan, China is exerting more influence on Taiwan by economic means in recent years, following China’s emergence as an economic great power and Taiwan’s rapid deepening of economic dependence on China. A typical example of such practices is the Favor-Granting policies, which is essentially a pork barrel project. China has intended to exert its influence on the broader Taiwanese people by promoting the policies to reduce anti-China sentiment in Taiwan and to encourage the people to support or vote for the party in Taiwan that is desirable to the Chinese government, in an effort to create advantageous circumstances for future reunification. The tourism policy of sending out mainland Chinese tourists is a diplomatic means which China has been employing toward other countries also. However, in the case of Taiwan, its precise effect was limited and not successful in achieving the political ends.

The literature on this topic has not completely grasped the reality of China’s influence exerted by the Favor-Granting policies. While the economic statecraft perspective elucidates the conditions with which China could exercise its influence effectively, it is not clear how the influence would exhibit its effect in Taiwan. Though political sociologists in Taiwan empirically explore the mechanisms of how China’s influence would penetrate Taiwanese society, as well as the importance of the native collaborators in Taiwan, they do not investigate the possibilities that its influence would ultimately be limited. Therefore, we need a comprehensive framework which enable us to analyze the interaction among actors involved with the Favor Granting policies.

This article adopts a clientelism approach to examine the effect of the tourism policy towards Taiwan. This is because China’s influence as seen in ‘Favor Granting’ is viewed as pork barrel politics, which appears in a quasi-nation’s territory called “Liang’an” including the mainland China and Taiwan. We can know the effect of China’s influence by considering whether the clientelism across the Taiwan Strait will operate effectively.

This article argues that the effective operation of the clientelism was constrained not only by a lack of the unity in the Chinese state, the market mechanism, and the existence of the de facto national border between China and Taiwan, but also by Taiwan’s democratic system. A principal-agent problem caused in the pork barrel politics undermined the effect of China’s tourism policy towards Taiwan. We argue that China’s economic statecraft is less lilely to be effective when it is applied to democratic countries.