Chinese tourists visit Taiwan frontline island for 1st time

Asian Economic News, Dec 13, 2004

TAIPEI, Dec. 7 Kyodo

Dozens of mainland Chinese visited Taiwan's outlying island of Kinmen on Tuesday, becoming the first group of Chinese tourists to travel to the frontline fortress in decades, the Central News Agency reported.

A total of 55 mainlanders, including members of a coal association in Fujian Province, set off from Xiamen port and arrived in the afternoon at Kinmen, located about 10 kilometers west of the Chinese mainland and 227 km east of the island of Taiwan, for a three-day sightseeing tour.

Kinmen, otherwise known as Quemoy, was the site of fierce fighting between communist and Nationalist forces when the latter withdrew from the mainland in 1949.

China and Taiwan have been governed separately since then, and direct postal, trade and shipping links with the mainland have been prohibited on national security grounds.

Taiwan opened limited links between Kinmen and Xiamen, as well as between Matsu, the other set of islands on the Fujian coast controlled by Taiwan, and the mainland's Mawei port in January 2001 in the absence of full-scale direct communication links across the Taiwan Strait.

To facilitate bilateral exchanges as well as to boost tourism to the Kinmen and Matsu, up to 600 Chinese people were allowed by Taiwan to enter the islands on a daily basis.

But China allowed none to cross over for sightseeing purposes until late September this year, when Fujian authorities announced they would allow 80 to 100 residents from the province each day to make tourism trips to Kinmen and Matsu.

Kinmen was officially discharged from its 40 years as a military preserve and began embracing tourists in 1993.