Deadline for airlines to pander to China
• Beijing tells foreign firms how to refer to Taiwan
Major US airlines are expected to change how their websites refer to Chinese-claimed Taiwan by Wednesday in an effort to avoid Chinese penalties, three sources said, after co-ordination between the carriers and the US government.
Beijing has demanded that foreign firms, and airlines in particular, not refer to self-ruled Taiwan as non-Chinese territory on their websites, along with Hong Kong and Macau.
The move was described by the White House in May as “Orwellian nonsense”.
China set a final deadline of July 25 for the changes, and in June rejected US requests for talks on the matter, adding to tension in relations already frayed by a trade conflict.
Numerous non-US airlines — including Air Canada, Lufthansa and British Airways — have already made changes to their websites after China’s Civil Aviation Administration sent a letter to 36 foreign air carriers earlier in the year.
The carriers were told to remove references on their websites and other materials that suggest Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are part of countries independent from China.
But several US operators, including Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, requested more time to handle the matter.
A US airline executive briefed on the issue told Reuters that the US state department notified China’s embassy in Washington late on Monday of the decision by US airlines to only list certain destinations by city on both Chinese and English websites and not refer to Taiwan as a jurisdiction.
As of Tuesday afternoon in Asia, the Hawaiian Airlines website appeared to have been changed, showing searches for flights to Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, as “Taipei, Taipei” in drop-down menus. Searches on the websites of American Airlines, Delta and United still mentioned it as being in Taiwan.
None of the airlines immediately responded to requests for comment, but Airlines for America, a trade group representing major carriers, acknowledged that changes were being made. “As with other sectors of the economy, the US airline industry is a global business that must contend with a host of regulations and requirements,” it said in a statement.
The airlines were expected to make the changes by the end of the day in China on Wednesday.
“We have told China that the US strongly objects to China’s attempts to compel private firms to use specific language of a political nature in their publicly available content. We continue to seek to address this issue,” a US embassy spokesman said.
It was unclear how China might punish airlines that do not comply. Beijing considers the democratic island of Taiwan a wayward province of “one China”. Hong Kong and Macau are part of China but are run largely autonomously.
“The ‘one China’ principle brooks no negotiations or consultations,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday. “We hope the US government urges companies to strictly abide by the ‘one China’ principle and make changes to their websites as soon as possible,” he said, adding the deadline was approaching and everyone should “wait and see” what would happen.