China asks Taiwan to allow visits from mainland

Press, 20 October 1987, Page 9

China asks Taiwan to allow visits from mainland

NZPA-Reuter Peking China responded yesterday to Taiwan’s recent relaxation of its ban on travel to the mainland by calling on Taipei to open its borders and let mainland Chinese be reunited with their families.

"People on both sides of the Taiwan Straits should have equal rights to visit relatives, pay respects to ancestors and perform family duties,” said a spokesman for the official Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League, quoted by the Communist Party newspaper “People’s Daily.” He added: “We have waited 40 years. We hope that the Taiwan authorities will lift the barriers they have imposed on our visits.” Taiwan announced last week that Taiwanese other than serving soldiers and civil servants would be able to visit close relatives on the mainland. Thousands of Taiwanese have already secretly visited relatives in China in recent years by obtaining special visas in the British colony of Hong Kong. China often calls on Taiwan to allow people-to-people contacts as part of its policy to woo the island into the communist fold and has welcomed

Taipei’s partial lifting of the travel ban. Many, families were divided when Chiang Kaishek’s defeated Nationalist army fled to Taiwan in 1949. Almost two million people, including 600,000 troops, made the crossing. The “People’s Daily” proposed that authorities from both sides should meet for consultations “under the principle of equality and mutual respect” to realise family visits both on the mainland and in Taiwan. One Taiwanese unlikely to return and see his family and former wife on the island is Li Dawei, an air force pilot who defected to the mainland in 1983. “I came to China disgusted with the corruption and prostitution in Taiwan and ready to join one billion people in developing China,” Mr Li said in a recent interview. Dressed in a smart suit and speaking in one of Peking’s plush hotels, Mr Li described how he held a late-night party to ply airport officials with wine

and took off the next morning in his reconnaissance plane, with a dummy propped up in the co-pilot’s seat. Mr Li, who now works as a trainer in a Peking air force institute and has the equivalent rank of colonel, said he had no regrets about leaving Taiwan. He has never seen his first wife since. After divorcing her in absentia — which he said helped free her from harassment from Taiwanese officials — he remarried in China. He says his lifestyle has changed — “Peking is really dull sometimes” — with no decent night-clubs to go to but he is happy One of the few mainland Chinese to make the trip across the sea to. Taiwan and return had a different view. “Of course I’d much rather live in Taiwan if I had the choice,” she said somewhat wistfully, listing freedom to travel and choose your own job and simple creature comforts as what she saw as important in life.