China aviation officials have written to world’s top airlines telling them to describe Taiwan as part of China

Flight Centre website tweaks 'were not done under Chinese pressure'

References to Hong Kong were altered on the websites of Australia’s biggest travel agencies to explicitly describe it as a Chinese territory.

China has taken an increasingly strident approach to foreign businesses over sensitive territorial issues.

Last month, China’s civil aviation authority wrote to 36 of the world’s big airlines, telling them to alter all references to Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong to explicitly describe them as part of China. The White House described the move as “Orwellian nonsense”, but Malaysia Airlines, Air Canada, Air France, and Finnair, among others, made changes to the way they described Taiwan before a reported deadline late on Friday.

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Qantas, the only Australian airline targeted, has been given an extension until mid-2018 to decide on its course of action.



Guardian Australia has found changes were made on two of Australia’s biggest flight booking websites: Student Flights and Flight Centre.

References to Hong Kong were changed to describe it as a special administrative region of China, replacing “Hong Kong” with “Hong Kong (SAR) China” in mid-2015. SAR stands for special administrative region.

The list of Taiwanese destinations on both websites was simultaneously altered from “Taiwan” to “Taiwan, Republic of China”. It is unclear what the intent of the changes were. Taiwan sometimes refers to itself as the Republic of China, whereas China’s official name is the People’s Republic of China.

The company that owns both websites, the Flight Centre Travel Group, denied suggestions that the Chinese government mounted pressure over the descriptions.

A spokesman said the changes were made by a third-party data supplier – who compiles and updates the list of international airports – and were not directly done by the Flight Centre Travel Group.

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The company has operated in China since 2002, but announced an expansion in the Chinese mainland in early 2016.



Any description of Taiwan as part of China is highly contentious. Taiwan views itself as an independent sovereign state, and maintains separate relations with more than a dozen other countries.

Beijing treats Taiwan as a breakaway province and believes it will eventually be reunified with China. It refuses diplomatic relations with any state that formally recognises Taiwan.

In recent months, the issue has created difficulties for multinational corporations, Taiwan’s last remaining allies, and even regional councils in Australia.

The Marriott International hotel chain was forced to apologise to China this year after an online customer survey described Macau, Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong in a way that suggested they were independent countries.

Beijing shut down Marriott’s website and China’s Cyberspace Administration, the internet regulator, said the company had “seriously violated national laws and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people”.

Marriott issued an apology saying it respected China’s territorial integrity but not the “separatist groups that subvert the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China”.

The US retailer Gap was also forced into an apology after selling a T-shirt with a map of China that did not include Taiwan or Tibet.



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This month, the Dominican Republic dumped official ties with Taiwan in favour of China, leaving the island state with just 19 diplomatic allies worldwide.

The Caribbean country said at the time that it “recognises that there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory”.

Weeks later, Burkina Faso followed suit and severed formal ties with Taiwan.

This month, the Rockhampton council’s commercial arm in central Queensland took responsibility for airbrushing the Taiwanese flag from a children’s art project before a big international beef expo.



“Advance Rockhampton made a decision to change one bull statue on display in Quay Street in line with the Australian government’s approach of adhering to the one-China policy,” the Advance Rockhampton general manager, Tony Cullen, told the ABC.

• This article was amended on 28 May 2018 to remove any implication that the description of Taiwan as the Republic of China suggested Flight Centre was acknowledging it as part of the People’s Republic of China.