China-Taiwan relax flight ban

BEIJING — For the first time in more than five decades, commercial airliners on Saturday flew nonstop across the tense Taiwan Strait, uniting families for the most important holiday in the Chinese-speaking world.

The direct flights, which will take place for the next three weeks, marked an unusual respite in tensions between China and Taiwan.

Bright red Lunar New Year banners festooned airports, and dancers gave passengers a festive send-off on the first flights, which left simultaneously at 8 a.m. (5 p.m. MST Friday) from Beijing and Guangzhou on the mainland and from Taipei, Taiwan's capital. China's state television offered live coverage.

A China Southern Airlines Boeing 777 that left Guangzhou touched down in Taipei later in the morning, becoming the first Chinese commercial airliner to land on Taiwan since 1949.

Over the next three weeks, 12 mainland and Taiwanese airlines will offer a total of 48 round-trip direct flights across the Strait. Once the holiday ends, the nonstop flights will halt.

The roughly 1 million Taiwanese living on the mainland, as well as those on the island, embraced the flights with the hope that they may become permanent one day.

"The great majority of people — 80 percent — consider this a good development," said Chao Chien-min, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei, speaking of recent opinion surveys. "It's a good breakthrough in the very icy relations."

A Taiwanese businessman based in Beijing, Wu Hsi-yang, said he was eager to take a nonstop flight rather than making a perfunctory stopover in the former British colonies of Hong Kong or Macao, far to the south, prolonging the trip by many hours.

"Normally, it takes about 12 hours for each trip to go back to Taipei," he said.

The nonstop flights still must travel far to the south through Hong Kong airspace before turning northeast to Taiwan. But the Beijing-Taipei flight will take only a little over four hours.

China's turn toward free markets has drawn thousands of Taiwanese businesses to the mainland to build and run factories. Trade rose 34 percent last year to more than $70 billion.

It's to permit Taiwanese business owners and managers who work in China to return home for the holiday that the direct flights were agreed on Jan. 15.