Messing with family reunions is a touchy business, but if the government — and the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) — are serious about upholding the nation’s sovereignty and dignity, as well as protecting the lives of Taiwanese and millions of other air passengers in the region, they must hold the line.
In this case, it is the line against Beijing’s unilateral imposition on Jan. 4 of four new air routes, contrary to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) regulations as well as a cross-strait agreement it made in 2015.
China acted in its usual high-handed manner, on the one hand saying that the new routes are needed to ease flight congestion over the Taiwan Strait and that it would maintain “technical communication” with Taiwan, and on the other declaring that it did not need to seek Taiwan’s approval before utilizing the routes.
However, according to ICAO — a group that China belongs to and Taiwan does not because of Beijing’s pique — China is required to coordinate with all affected parties if changes to any route are made or before new routes are launched.
When China announced in January 2015 that it was going to open four new routes that would carry traffic over the Strait, Taiwan protested that the paths were too close to Taiwanese airspace and intersected with Taiwanese routes.
Taipei was able to prevail in its demand that talks be held, and in March an agreement was reached that route M503 would not only carry just southbound traffic, but would also be shifted further to the west and that China would only open new routes after consulting with Taiwan.
With the peak Lunar New Year holiday period for cross-strait flights approaching, Chinese airlines are trying to blackmail Taiwan into caving in to their demands.
The CAA on Thursday said that China Eastern Airlines, Xiamen Air and two other Chinese carriers had broken with precedent to advertise and sell seats on such flights, presumably confident that authorities in Taipei would yield in the face of irate Taiwanese businesspeople, students and family members eager to return home from China for what is the most important holiday for ethnic Chinese societies.
China Eastern and Xiamen Air have asked to operate 176 additional flights, a request that the CAA yesterday said it had refused because the two are using the new routes, although not for the holiday flights.
Xiamen countered that more than 10,000 people had already made reservations for the flights and urged authorities in Taipei to approve the extra holiday flights to “comply with popular demand.”
The authorities should stand firm.
It has been just 16 years since the first cross-strait flights began, in the form of one-way charters from Shanghai organized to bring Taiwanese businesspeople and their families home for the Lunar New Year holiday.
In 2009, regularly scheduled cross-strait flights began, but additional flights for the Lunar New Year are still subject to negotiation.
The only real bargaining chip that the government has to force Beijing to the negotiating table over its new M503 northbound route and the three east-west ones is to stand firm on not permitting Chinese carriers to add extra flights for next month’s holiday.
This would be very unpopular, especially among China-based Taiwanese businesspeople, but they are not fans of the Democratic Progressive Party to begin with. However, it is crucial if flight safety and national security are truly to be protected.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) on Wednesday said that “the Taiwan authority should take a correct view of the route and not make an issue of it to interfere with cross-strait relations.”
Yet, once again, it is Beijing’s actions that are interfering with cross-strait relations, even as it tries to deflect the blame to Taipei.
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