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Taipei Ready to Discuss Air Charters with Beijing

Taiwan said on November 4 that it was ready to talk to the mainland about allowing direct charter flights ahead of the peak Lunar New Year travel season in early 2006, a day after an invitation was tendered by the Cross-Straits Aviation Transport Exchange Council of the Chinese mainland.

But the island's top mainland policy-making body, the "Mainland Affairs Council," said it would prefer to discuss an opening of direct cargo and passenger charters on a regular basis as well.

Taiwan has banned from direct air links with the mainland in 1949, when the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war and fled to the island.

But Taipei and Beijing exchanged landmark non-stop charter flights for the first time in over five decades during the Lunar New Year Festival in January and February in 2005 after two sides met in Macao to iron out details.

The flights will take place "if the 2006 Lunar New Year charter flights are based on the same model of the 2005 charters," council Vice-Chairman David Huang told a news conference. “We hope they will show some flexibility in cargo and passenger charters so we can make some progress on that front as soon as possible."

Despite often testy ties, Taiwan companies are estimated to have invested more than US$100 billion on the mainland since the 1980s.

An estimated one million of Taiwanese, or 5 percent of its population, work or live on the mainland and must normally transit through places such as Hong Kong when travelling between the mainland and the island. This adds at least four hours to their journeys.

Direct air links would be the latest in a series of developments, from visits to the mainland by Taiwan opposition politicians to Beijing's promises to give Taipei two endangered pandas, which help ease relations between the two sides in 2005.