room Cheng Pao Hotel near central Taiwan's Sun Moon Lake separates Chinese tourists from Japanese guests at meals to ensure those from China don't take out their nationalist aggressions on visitors from Japan. "Japanese and Chinese guests eat at different times and in different places, in case of conflict," hotel manager Chang Tse-yen said. The same hotel also struggles to feed eight-person Chinese tour groups on the dirt-cheap maximum of T$1,200 ($39) that some are willing to pay for meals, including extra garlic and extra chili peppers. Taiwanese diners would expect to pay more. "Chinese tourists seldom travel outside China, so they may not be used to some things," Chang said. Cheng Pao hotel's experience with its trickle of Chinese tourists is a signal of how much culture shock Taiwan can expect when it opens its doors to thousands of visitors from China on Friday. Though most people in China and Taiwan are ethnic Chinese, 59 years of separation and radically different governments have pulled them apart. The two have been ruled separately since defeated Nationalist forces fled to the island amid civil war in 1949. The two sides agreed at a historic meeting last month to let up to 3,000 China tourists visit the largely forbidden island, which sees them as a way to jumpstart the economy. "There's a culture gap, so I definitely think there are going to be growing pains," said Raymond Wu, a political risk consultant in Taipei. "There may be a sense of superiority or an inferiority complex depending on your perspective." The differences are myriad. People from Taiwan and Japan generally get on well, as Taiwanese have fonder memories of their Japanese colonial past than Chinese. There would have been no need for separate dining times at Sun Moon lake's Cheng Pao hotel. Taiwan citizens, who are influenced heavily by hyper-polite Japan, fear Chinese will yell, spit or cut in on queues, all of which are an anathema to many Taiwanese.
