China to start individual tourism to Taiwan late June

Reuters: China said on Sunday it will start allowing its citizens to visit Taiwan as individual tourists from late this month, relaxing rules that tether mainland tourists to tightly-run groups and wooing the island with an economic boost.

The trial start of the new rules was announced by Wang Yi, the director of the Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s State Council, or cabinet, and the shift could benefit airlines, hotels and Taiwanese businesses hoping to attract more free-moving and free-spending Chinese tourists.

Wang told a meeting in Fujian, the mainland province facing Taiwan, that “the two sides of the (Taiwan) strait will formally launch the first trial batch of mainland residents visiting Taiwan as individual tourists from June 28,” the China News Service reported.The individual travel could “bring in two billion yuan in tourism revenues for Taiwan within half a year,” China’s Xinhua news agency reported, citing unnamed industry sources.

At the meeting in Fujian, Taiwan and China also agreed to increase passenger flights between them by 50 per cent to up to 558 flights every week, Xinhua also reported.

Taiwan has been divided from the mainland since 1949, when fleeing Nationalist forces took over the island. Beijing claims sovereignty over self-ruled and democratic Taiwan and has vowed to bring it under Chinese rule, by force if necessary.

But China has also sought to win over more Taiwanese to the idea of eventual reunification through economic incentives.

Chinese tourists have been officially allowed to travel to Taiwan since July 2008, but they have had to sign up to package tours that give them little room for choosing destinations, hotels and restaurants.

The first Chinese tourists able to travel under the relaxed rules will come from the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen, the head of the Chinese tourist authority, Shao Qiwei, told the meeting in Fujian province.

In the first five months of this year, 520,000 mainland residents joined tour groups to Taiwan, said the China News Service report. Tourism-based stocks on the Taipei stock exchange, including Regent Taipei and other hotel operators, have risen over recent weeks in anticipation of growing business from individual mainland tourists, many of them likely to be younger, middle-class visitors not afraid to spend. The freeing up of mainland tourism could benefit Taiwan’s China Airlines and Eva Airways, as well as mainland services offering flights to Taiwan, including China Southern Airlines and Air China.  But officials from Taiwan and China agreed to heed passengers’ ire about the price of travel by “regulating” the price of air tickets for direct flights connecting Beijing and Shanghai and Taipei, the Xinhua news agency reported. It gave no details of what that could involve.

Policy towards the mainland will dominate Taiwan’s next president election race in 2012.

The incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalist, or Kuomintang, party will be defending his efforts to draw closer to the mainland against the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, which is wary of Beijing and has favoured independence-leaning policies.