Tentative links take wing between uneasy rivals

TAIPEI - Charter flights between Taiwan and China begin on Friday, ferrying tens of thousands of Taiwan people to the mainland for the Lunar New Year holiday, but permanent air links seem as far off as ever.

Taiwan has banned direct air links with China since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, but the two sides arranged non-stop flights for the first time in five decades last year during the biggest festival in the Chinese-speaking world.

Chinese pile aboard trains, boats and planes in their hundreds of millions for the Lunar New Year holiday, a time for far-flung families to gather, in the biggest migration of humans.

The Lunar New Year begins on January 29 this year and festivities start earlier.

But turning the once-in-a-year agreement into a regular service between China and Taiwan looks a long way off with Taipei and Beijing apparently unwilling to make compromises to narrow their political differences.

China views self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province and has vowed to attack the democratic island of 23 million people if it moves towards formal statehood.

The two sides however agreed to run the holiday flights again this year, allowing six airlines from each side to fly between four Chinese cities and two Taiwan cities from January 20 to February 13.

"It is nice to have direct charter flights for the Lunar New Year, but once a year is just not good enough," said 36-year-old Taiwan businessman Jason Wong, who spends six to eight hours travelling between his Shanghai office and Taipei home every month, via Hong Kong or Macau, for what is supposed to be a 90-minute journey.

The holiday flights, technically still indirect for they must still fly over Hong Kong or Macau air space but don't have to land, reduce travel time between Taipei and Shanghai to less than three hours.

As part of efforts to court Taiwan investors, Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the coastal province of Fujian, opposite Taiwan, on Saturday, telling Taiwan businesses there he hoped private organisations could work out a formula to open up direct transport routes.

But Hu's comments were dismissed by the island as insincere.

Despite political tension, trade and personnel exchanges have blossomed since the late 1980s, with Taiwan firms pouring over US$100 billion ($143 billion) of investment into China.

A poll by the Chinese-language United Daily News showed 61 per cent of 1116 respondents in favour of direct air links with China.

With about a million Taiwanese, or 5 per cent of the population, working or living in China, seats of the 72 Lunar New Year charter flights are filling up fast. "The message is quite happy for us. There is a lot of demand," said Johnson Sun, spokesman for Taiwan's biggest carrier, China Airlines, which operates eight flights to Beijing and Shanghai.

- REUTERS