An agreement was reached in Macao on non-stop charter flights for Taiwanese businessmen during the Spring Festival holiday this year. According to Ta Kung Pao, a Beijing observer said that the agreement will help ease the atmosphere of the cross-Straits relations, but the political stalemate across the Straits has not yet been broken. As the charter planes during the Spring Festival holiday are only a specific case, it is not equal to "three direct links"and direct flights, so it still falls far short of the expectations of the people across the Straits.

Li Jiaquan, a Beijing expert on the Taiwan question, said that besides satisfying Taiwanese businessmen's wish of spending the Spring Festival in Taiwan and facilitating their trips, the agreement has the following three-faceted significance.

First, realization of "two-way direct flights" will enable planes from the Chinese mainland to make their first landing on the soil of Taiwan since the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, which is of great symbolic and historical significance.

Second, compared with the charter flights in 2003, the 2005 Spring Festival charter planes have made progress, changing from the previous "one-way, indirect flights with stops at designated destinations"to "two-way, non-stop flights through multiple cities."Beijing and Guangzhou are added to the designated sites in the mainland, which indicates that under the circumstance of impossibility to reach a consensus on political issues across the Straits, it is possible to bring into reality direct fights, and it should also be possible to realize the "three direct links"through shelving political disputes and by employing only the method of people-to-people, and industry-to-industry consultations. However, the Taiwan authorities' obstruction is the main obstacle.

Third, the Spring Festival charter flights this time are handled as a specific case. The passengers are limited to Taiwan businessmen and their families. This is inseparably associated with the Taiwan authorities' insistence. The mainland has always hoped that all the Taiwan compatriots on the mainland who hold Taiwan compatriot certificates should be allowed to take the charter planes. But the result proved unsuccessful, the direct reason for this is that the Taiwan authorities adamantly refused to make concessions under the pretext of political issues. The Taiwan authorities stuck to the so-called "Taiwan-Hong Kong model", demanding formal contacts between authorities and between officials, while the mainland clearly voiced its opposition to officials of the two sides participating in the consultations. The mainland would not send representatives from the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council or the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) and Taiwan should not send representatives from the "Mainland Affairs Council"or the Straits Exchange Foundation. Neither of the two sides gave in, which shows the political deadlock across the Straits has not been broken. The mainland upholds the "one China"principle and the "1992 Consensus", while the Taiwan authorities take "one country on each side"as the fundamental principle for handling cross-Straits affairs.

By People's Daily Online