More Chinese citizens will be allowed to visit Taiwan’s outlying islands for sightseeing after Beijing announced yesterday that it would relax controls on tourism across the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing’s announcement, made by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Wang Yi (王毅), allows residents of 13 Chinese cities and provinces — who are already allowed to make sightseeing trips to Taiwan — to visit Kinmen, Matsu and Penghu, a Xinhua news agency report said.
Until now, only residents of Fujian Province were allowed to travel as tourists to Kinmen, Matsu and Penghu.
Residents of the 13 Chinese cities and provinces who are already allowed to visit Taiwan proper will now also be permitted to travel to Taiwan proper via the three outlying islands, the announcement said.
Until now, residents of these cities and provinces could only travel to Taiwan for leisure trips via Hong Kong, Macau or other “third country” areas, or on the direct weekend cross-strait charters between Taiwan and China launched in mid-July.
The 13 administrative districts whose residents are allowed to visit Taiwan are Liaoning, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong, Hubei, Guangdong, Yunnan and Shaanxi provinces and the cities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing.
On Thursday, Taiwan’s Cabinet approved a proposal to permit Chinese tourists to travel to Taiwan proper from Kinmen and Matsu.
The proposal is expected to be passed by the Legislative Yuan by the end of this year.
Once it passes, eligible Chinese tourists with proper entry visas will be permitted to travel to Taiwan from Kinmen or Matsu for tourism purposes. However, those who enter the two offshore islands on landing visas will not have that option.
The measure is being introduced to help attract more Chinese tourists to Taiwan in the wake of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s pledge in mid-July to allow up to 3,000 Chinese tourists per day to enter Taiwan and to establish direct weekend passenger charter flights across the Taiwan Strait.
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