Chinese planes make historic flight to Taiwan

Chinese planes touched down in Taiwan today, completing the first non-stop flights between the rivals since a bloody civil war split the two sides 56 years ago.

A pilot smiled and waved from his cockpit window after landing his China Southern Airlines plane, which took off from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou carrying 277 Taiwanese businesspeople and their families home for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Many of the travellers wore matching red vests and baseball hats and walked under an arch made of yellow and red balloons in an airport reception room. They were greeted by politicians, officials and TV camera crews.

The Guangzhou-Taipei flight took about one and a half hours. Minutes after the plane landed, another Chinese carrier, Xiamen Airlines, completed a flight from Guangzhou to the Taiwanese capital.

Taiwan’s two biggest carriers, China Airlines and EVA Airways, are also making their first flights to Beijing on Saturday.

Taiwan had banned Chinese airlines from flying to the island since the communists won the civil war and took over the mainland in 1949. Taipei has worried that Chinese bombers and troop planes disguised as airliners might be used to attack the island, 100 miles off the mainland’s southern coast.

But today’s flights were the first of 48 that Beijing and Taipei approved for the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, which begins on February 9.

They marked a rare break in feuding across the Taiwan Strait, one of the world’s most dangerous potential flashpoints.

The flights symbolise “the hopes of the two sides for peace, stability, dialogue and mutual development”, said John Chang, a Taiwan legislator who helped to arrange the flights and spoke at a send-off ceremony at the Beijing airport.

Chang is the grandson of Taiwan’s former president, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who led his Nationalist forces to the island after losing a civil war on the mainland to Mao Tse-tung’s communists.

Traditional dragon dancers in orange-and-yellow costumes performed in biting dawn cold on the airport runway.

In a diplomatic gesture, the red Chinese communist flag on the fuselage of the Air China plane making the first flight was covered. The logo on the plane’s tail – a stylised red bird on a white backdrop – was repainted in black and white for the flight.

Until Saturday, travellers between Taiwan and China had to stop over in Hong Kong – which enjoys a special status and is not directly ruled by Beijing – or another third point en route between Taiwan and the mainland, turning a trip that could be a few hours into a full day’s journey.

But Taiwanese businesses that have invested more than £55 billion on the mainland are lobbying their government to end the ban.