BEIJING, Feb. 25 -- China suggested new economic and travel links with Taiwan on Friday designed to benefit the island's high-tech businessmen, its produce farmers and many families with loved ones on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
The proposals, announced by the government's Taiwan Affairs Office, marked the latest in a series of conciliatory gestures from Beijing and Taipei aimed at relaxing tensions across the strait despite fundamental discord between the two governments over Taiwan's status.
"We will try our best to do everything that is good for our compatriots in Taiwan," Li Weiyi, chief spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a news conference in Beijing.
Li said China was prepared to start talks about scheduling more direct charter flights between mainland cities and Taiwan. Ordinarily, travelers between China and Taiwan must pass through Hong Kong or Macau, turning a voyage of several hours into an all-day affair.
The new flights, Li said, should follow the example of charters arranged for Taiwanese residents of China who made family visits for the Chinese New Year festivities that ended Wednesday.
More than 10,700 people took the direct flights, half from Taiwan to the mainland and half in the other direction, according to Tang Yi, who heads the economic bureau of the Taiwan Affairs Office.
Similar direct charter flights could be arranged for future family-oriented holidays, Li suggested. Li also said China was open to talks on starting direct cargo flights between Taiwan and the mainland. Such flights have long been a goal of Taiwanese businesses with assembly plants on the mainland.
Taiwan Affairs Office officials also proposed negotiations on allowing Taiwan fruit and vegetable farmers to sell more produce in mainland China, a potentially profitable market.
"We fully understand the difficulty faced by our brothers the Taiwanese farmers," Tang said. "We welcome you to develop your business in the mainland, and we will try to do our best to strengthen our cooperation."
Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, which handles relations with Beijing, reacted cautiously to the proposals raised in Beijing. "We will be flexible," Chiu Tai-san, the council's deputy director, told reporters in Taipei, the capital. "It depends on the details."
The effort to lower tensions in the strait began shortly after Taiwan's Dec. 11 legislative elections dealt an unexpected setback to President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party. The blow was interpreted as a warning to Chen over his confrontational style in dealing with the mainland.
After evaluating the vote, the Chinese government decided to appeal to Taiwanese who supported Chen but might have feared that his attitude was needlessly angering China and raising the risk of war, according to a Chinese specialist with access to official thinking in Beijing.
But at the same time, the National People's Congress announced plans to pass a law in March formally branding secession as illegal. The largely symbolic legislation has upset Taiwanese officials, who describe it as justification for war if Chen crosses the Rubicon on independence.
China has pledged to use military force if necessary to prevent the self-governing island from acquiring formal independence.
The proposals to help Taiwan's fruit and vegetable farmers, the Chinese specialist said, targeted Taiwan's southern agricultural area, traditionally a political base for Chen due to its high numbers of native Taiwanese.
Similarly, Li's pledge to "think positively" about direct cargo flights was aimed at Taiwan's powerful business community. Chen has mentioned his desire to see such flights begin.
Chen has shown more caution since the vote in December. For instance, he has delayed implementing plans to replace the name "China" with "Taiwan" in government-connected businesses such as the national airline.
In another gesture, Chen said Thursday that he would not rule out Taiwan's eventual reunion with China, provided Taiwan's 23 million people accepted it.
Special correspondent Tim Culpan in Taipei contributed to this report.
