China and Taiwan Strike Travel Agreement

BEIJING, June 13 -- China and Taiwan agreed Friday to allow 36 round-trip charter flights every weekend as the first step in a plan to dramatically expand visits to the self-ruled island by Chinese tourists.

The agreement, signed in Beijing after the first official China-Taiwan negotiations in a decade, was hailed as a starting point for what leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have promised will be a bold process of detente and, eventually, a peace accord setting aside half a century of hostility.

"The final aim is peace and shared prosperity," Chiang Pin-kun, Taiwan's chief negotiator and head of the semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation, told reporters at a news conference.

But he also cautioned that many obstacles remain on the path to a broad detente between the longtime adversaries and the specific economic, political and security agreements that Presidents Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan and Hu Jintao of China have held out as their ultimate goals.

The travel agreement, which also includes the right to open airline and travel offices on each other's territory, marked the first concrete achievement since Ma took over as Taiwan's president May 20. In a clear change in atmosphere, Ma has proposed -- and Hu has agreed to -- setting aside the long dispute over Taiwan's status and working instead to improve economic, political and strategic relations.

In contrast, Ma's predecessor, Chen Shui-bian, used his eight years in office to push a Taiwanese independence agenda, seeking to emphasize the self-ruled island's de facto sovereignty and encouraging Taiwanese national identity among its 23 million inhabitants.

Taiwan, which lies 100 miles off China's southern rim, has ruled itself since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek fled there with his defeated Nationalist forces. But ever since the victorious Mao Zedong founded the Communist Party government in Beijing that same year, China has been determined to bring the island back into the national fold, through force if necessary.

The charter flights, beginning July 4, will be forced for the time being to fly through Hong Kong airspace on the way, a security precaution insisted on by Taiwan. But Ma said in a recent interview he wants to eliminate that time-consuming and costly detour soon and allow direct scheduled flights bringing in as many as 1 million mainland tourists a year. So far, charter flights have been limited to four Chinese holidays each year, bearing mostly people on family visits.

In addition, the agreement announced Friday says that negotiations on chartered freight flights are to begin within three months. This was an important point for Taiwan, whose business owners run many factories in mainland China that often require swift resupply.

Despite the high-level promises of broad negotiations and overall detente, the talks were confined largely to details of the travel arrangements, which had been mostly worked out in advance. This focus was in line with a decision by the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee to work on easy technical issues first, gradually steering toward the more sensitive political and military topics.

But Chiang told the news conference that he had brought up Taiwan's desire for "more international space," the term of art for its drive to join international bodies such as the World Health Organization. This was in line with Ma's desire to move quickly into political and strategic negotiations, conducting them simultaneously with trade talks.

Hu recently told Wu Po-hsiung, the chairman of Ma's Nationalist Party, that the international agency membership issue could be worked out if both sides showed flexibility. But he made no commitments, and China seemed determined to proceed step-by-step. In what seemed to be a measure of the different approaches, Taiwan's media portrayed the travel negotiations as a breakthrough while China's government-controlled press and television gave it more muted coverage.