Taiwan urges China to discuss 'familiarization' trips

Taipei, Jan. 25 (CNA) The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) has urged Chinese authorities to discuss with Taiwan "familiarization trips" they are planning to Taiwan to prepare for the resumption of tour group visits by Shanghai and Fujian province residents.

"To ensure that future tourism exchanges are conducted in a healthy and orderly manner, matters related to familiarization trips to Taiwan should be discussed through 'the two cross-strait tourism associations' before proceeding," the MAC said in a statement Friday.

The council said the Taiwan Strait Tourism Association (TSTA) will soon contact the Association For Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits (ATETS) to propose discussions on matters of mutual concern.

The TSTA and ATETS were established by Taipei and Beijing, respectively, to facilitate coordination and negotiations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait on tourism.

The MAC's statement came in response to a statement made earlier Friday by Chen Binhua (陳斌華), spokesperson for China's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), the MAC's counterpart in China.

In the statement, Chen confirmed that organizers of familiarization trips had submitted applications to Taiwanese authorities to visit Taiwan.

Chen said the TAO is "pleased to see" that organizers of the familiarization trips had submitted requests for visits to the Taiwanese side.

"We hope that the visits by tourism professionals from the two regions to Taiwan proceed smoothly, laying a solid foundation for the resumption of group travel for residents of both regions," Chen said.

China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT) currently only allows Fujian residents to visit Taiwan-held Kinmen and Matsu, but not other cities or counties in Taiwan.

On Jan. 17, the MCT announced that China's government will "soon resume group travel to Taiwan for residents of Fujian province and Shanghai."

The purpose of the resumption, according to the MCT announcement, was to "further promote the normalization of interaction between individuals across the Taiwan Strait and the regularization of (cross-strait) exchanges in various fields."

In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese visitors accounted for around a quarter of all foreign visitors to Taiwan, but that source of tourism income has all but dried up, with independent or group travel largely frozen by the Chinese authorities for over four years.