Government officials will greet historic charter flights from China on Jan. 29, the day when the special service begins to carry Taiwan businesspeople home for the Lunar New Year holiday, a Mainland Affairs Council official said yesterday.
According to the official, council Vice Chairman Chiu Tai-san (邱太三), Civil Aeronautics Administration Director-General Billy Chang (張國政) and officials from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the Straits Exchange Foundation will get together that day at CKS International Airport to welcome the planes coming from China.
Celebrations will also be held at Kaohsiung International Airport.
Nine flights will be offered on the first day of the direct service, to be provided by six aviation companies from either side of the Taiwan Strait.
At present, about 4,000 Taiwan businesspeople and their dependents in China -- 2,400 in Shanghai, 1,050 in Guangzhou and 480 in Beijing -- have applied to take the direct charter flights to Taiwan.
Airlines do not expect the routes to make money.
Officials from Taiwan and China agreed on the flight model earlier this month in Macau, under which Chinese carriers are also included in the service.
It marks a departure from 2003, when the first such charter flights took off -- operated solely by Taiwanese airlines which had to fly via Hong Kong or Macau.
The flights were not offered last year because of China's refusal to talk with Taiwan over its demand that Chinese carriers be also allowed to operate the flights.
The German city of Hamburg on Oct. 14 named a bridge “Kaohsiung-Brucke” after the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. The footbridge, formerly known as F566, is to the east of the Speicherstadt, the world’s largest warehouse district, and connects the Dar-es-Salaam-Platz to the Brooktorpromenade near the Port of Hamburg on the Elbe River. Timo Fischer, a Free Democratic Party member of the Hamburg-Mitte District Assembly, in May last year proposed the name change with support from members of the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union. Kaohsiung and Hamburg in 1999 inked a sister city agreement, but despite more than a quarter-century of
Taiwanese officials are courting podcasters and influencers aligned with US President Donald Trump as they grow more worried the US leader could undermine Taiwanese interests in talks with China, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has said Taiwan would likely be on the agenda when he is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) next week in a bid to resolve persistent trade tensions. China has asked the White House to officially declare it “opposes” Taiwanese independence, Bloomberg reported last month, a concession that would mark a major diplomatic win for Beijing. President William Lai (賴清德) and his top officials
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday expressed “grave concerns” after Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) reiterated the city-state’s opposition to “Taiwanese independence” during a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強). In Singapore on Saturday, Wong and Li discussed cross-strait developments, the Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. “Prime Minister Wong reiterated that Singapore has a clear and consistent ‘one China’ policy and is opposed to Taiwan independence,” it said. MOFA responded that it is an objective fact and a common understanding shared by many that the Republic of China (ROC) is an independent, sovereign nation, with world-leading
‘ONE CHINA’: A statement that Berlin decides its own China policy did not seem to sit well with Beijing, which offered only one meeting with the German official German Minister for Foreign Affairs Johann Wadephul’s trip to China has been canceled, a spokesperson for his ministry said yesterday, amid rising tensions between the two nations, including over Taiwan. Wadephul had planned to address Chinese curbs on rare earths during his visit, but his comments about Berlin deciding on the “design” of its “one China” policy ahead of the trip appear to have rankled China. Asked about Wadephul’s comments, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Guo Jiakun (郭嘉昆) said the “one China principle” has “no room for any self-definition.” In the interview published on Thursday, Wadephul said he would urge China to
RSS