The first journalists from China to be allowed to be based in Taiwan will arrive early next month, government officials said yesterday.
The two journalists are Fan Liqing (范麗青) and Chen Binhua (陳斌華), from China's official Xinhua News Agency (新華社), the Government Information Office (GIO) said yesterday.
"We hope [their visit] will strengthen news exchange and media access across the Taiwan Strait and, moreover, enhance mutual understanding and interaction between people of both sides," GIO director Su Tzen-ping (蘇正平) told the Taipei Times yesterday.
Su added that the gradual opening of Taiwan's doors to Chinese journalists was an inevitable trend.
Su said that visiting Chinese journalists would enjoy generally the same privileges as local reporters.
However, as correspondents of the first Chinese media organization to be stationed in Taiwan, Fan and Chen would only be allowed to cover news in the metropolitan Taipei area.
If they want to conduct interviews in other areas including Kinmen (金門) and Matsu (馬祖) or cover news about top-ranking government branches such as the Presidential Office and the Cabinet, applications would have to be submitted to the GIO for approval on a case by case basis, Su said.
Currently the deputy director of Xinhua's Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau desk, Fan has been to Taiwan three times. The last time she visited Taiwan was when she accompanied Li Yafei (李亞飛), an official at the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (海協會), to facilitate preparatory work for the Koo-Wang talks (辜汪會談).
Statistics show that Taiwanese journalists have made more than 5,000 news gathering trips to China over the past few years, but that Chinese reporters have only visited Taiwan about 400 times.
Only about 20 of those trips, however, were actually in Taiwan to cover the news, while the rest came for "other particular" reasons, a source in the GIO said yesterday. Therefore, the GIO hopes that by lifting restrictions, there would be more news coverage on Taiwanese affairs in China.
The source, nevertheless, said that the discrepancy in the number of reporting trips between journalists from Taiwan and China was not a result of restrictions enforced by Taiwan's government, but of Chinese reporters not being given permission to go by the Chinese authorities.
The source also said that some officials in the Cabinet were not optimistic about the new measure, because "the purpose of these visiting Chinese journalists in Taiwan is to collect information for intelligence use."
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