Taiwanese, regardless of their party affiliation, should welcome China’s further opening to cross-strait tourist exchanges, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) said yesterday.
The Taipei office of the Beijing-based Cross-Strait Tourism Association (CSTA) announced on Monday that China will allow residents of six remote areas — Gansu and Qinghai provinces and the autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Ningxia Hui and Xinjiang Uyghur — to visit Taiwan from July 18.
They are the last Chinese administrative districts to lift travel restrictions to Taiwan on their residents. The Chinese government began allowing citizens in 13 provinces and large metropolises to visit Taiwan for holiday in July 2008.
Su said he believes both the pan-blue and pan-green camps should welcome China’s decision to fully open its doors for its citizens to visit Taiwan.
Meanwhile, CSTA Taipei office director Fan Guishan (范貴山) said in a recent interview with the Chinese-language United Daily News that with the lifting of the travel restrictions, the number of Chinese tourist arrivals in Taiwan will break the 1 million a year mark soon.
The latest CSTA tallies showed that from July 2008 to April 20, the total number of Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan was more than 1 million.
The CSTA is a quasi-official organization authorized to handle tourist exchanges with Taiwan in the absence of official ties. Its Taipei office is the first office of any kind to be established by China in Taiwan.
Fan said he plans to lead his office staff on an islandwide tour soon, focusing on southern Taiwan, to get a better understanding of Taiwan’s travel environment.
Southern Taiwan is a traditional pan-green stronghold.
Fan said Chinese authorities are studying the feasibility of allowing Chinese to make individual visits, as some Taiwanese travel operators have urged.
“The issues being studied include mode of travel, issuance of documents, experimental procedures and problems that may arise during individual travel,” Fan said.
There is no timetable for concluding such an arrangement, Fan said, adding that if individual visits were allowed, they would begin with residents of major cities.
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