After years of waiting and hoping, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday that there are good omens that the Hong Kong and Macau governments will set up representative branches in Taiwan.
According to Chang Yung-shan (張永山), director of the MAC's Department of Hong Kong and Macau Affairs, Hong Kong's semi-official Trade Development Council has recently inquired about the regulations involved in setting up a branch in Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the Macau government has asked the Macau University of Science and Technology to research the possibility of setting up a representative office in Taiwan.
"The moves made by the two governments are good signs for Taiwan ... and I am pretty optimistic about that," Chang said.
Chang, however, declined to predict whether the plans will materialize this year.
Chang made his remarks in a news conference yesterday while briefing reporters about recent developments in the relationship between Taiwan and the two Chinese territories.
He also talked about the work the council plans to do to help exchanges between Taiwan and the two former colonies.
An important project for the department this year, said Chang, will be to keep pushing the two regional governments to establish their representative offices in Taiwan to help their citizens who visit and live here.
The latest figures show that an estimated 303,306 Hong Kong residents visited Taiwan last year while 21,280 Macau citizens entered Taiwan for various purposes in the same period.
Even before the two former colonies were handed over to China (Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999) Taiwan had long strived to get the two territories to set up representative offices in Taiwan Those hopes, however, were never realized.
Meanwhile, vice chairman of the MAC, Chen Ming-tong (
Taiwan and China have both now approved the flights between Shanghai and Taiwan. But Chen said that China's slow approval of the first ever cross-strait charter service had created an "uncertainty factor."
Chen made the remarks in a routine weekly news conference while answering questions from reporters about the low sales of the charter-flight tickets.
As of yesterday, only 877 out of the 1,700 available seats had been booked.
"This is the first time for Taiwan and China to have this kind of charter service. There are naturally some uncertain factors," said Chen.
He declined, however, to elaborate on what those factors were.
He did say that after Taiwan announced its decision to allow a domestic carrier to run the flights, China waited more than a month before it approved the holiday service.
"That might have influenced Taiwanese businessmen's desire to patronize such a service," he said.
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