Taipei/Beijing - For the first time in five decades, China
and Taiwan launched regular direct flights on Friday, signaling a new
direction in relations between the long-time rivals.
A China Southern Airlines plane departed from Guangzhou at 6:31 am
with 100 tourists among the 258 passengers on board bound for Taipei
where it landed at 8:10 am after a 1,124-kilometre flight.
China Southern Chairman Liu Shaoyong flew the Airbus A330 and said
he was excited because Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are
one family.
'It feels like coming home. But I still hope we can launch regular
flights and I believe that will happen soon,' he told reporters at
the Taoyuan International Airport outside Taipei.
Four other weekend chartered flights also took off Friday morning
from Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Xiamen. Altogether, approximately
760 Chinese tourists are on their way for one-week visits in Taiwan.
Taiwan also launched nine charter flights bound for China,
carrying tourists, businessmen and an 'inaugural delegation'
consisting of local officials to China.
In Beijing, a ceremony was held prior to the departure of the
cross-Strait weekend charter flights and China's CCTV aired a special
cross-strait charter flight programme to give live coverage of the
launch of the charter flights and invited scholars to discuss
Taipei-Beijing ties.
In Taiwan, the Tourism Bureau welcomed Chinese tourists at
various airports with flowers, lion dances and firecrackers. The
newly-renovated Taipei Songshan Airport greeted Chinese tourists with
a photo showing Chinese President Hu Jintao shaking hands with Wu
Poh-hsiung, chairman of Taiwan's ruling party KMT, in Beijing on May
28.
Wang Yi, director of the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office,
said that Friday marked a new beginning in the history of
cross-Strait exchanges.
Many of the Chinese tourists arriving in Taiwan said they were
overwhelmed by the welcome they received and hoped the restriction
that Chinese tourists must visit Taiwan with as groups, not as
individual travelers, will soon be scrapped.
The opening of weekend charter flights is part of President Ma
Ying-jeou's package to seek economic cooperation with China and
reduce the risk of war.
Ma, inaugurated on May 20, hopes that the weekend charter flights
can be expanded to daily flights and eventually to regular flights
across the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan, seat of the exiled Republic of China since the end of the
Chinese Civil War in 1949, has banned direct sea, air and trade links
with China since 1949, and has banned Chinese mainlanders from
entering Taiwan.
The ban has forced people travelling across the Taiwan Strait to
transit through a third place, usually Hong Kong.
China has repeatedly called on Taiwan to drop the bans to pave the
way for Taiwan's unification with the motherland.
But Ma, while supporting economic integration with China, has
rejected China's call for unification, saying conditions are not ripe
for discussing unification yet.
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