China and Taiwan aviation officials agreed to resume charter flights for the Lunar New Year next month, allowing six Chinese mainland airlines to fly to the island for the first time in more than half a century.

The flights, the second in three years, will involve six carriers from each side operating a combined 48 charters between three cities in China and two in Taiwan, according to a joint statement issued after talks in Macau today.

”It’s a historic breakthrough,” said Laurence Brahm, a Beijing-based lawyer and political economist. “It offers the possibility of a turning point in the cross-Strait impasse. It leads to the real possibility of some steps being taken down the road toward real dialogue.”

An estimated million Taiwanese live and work in China, many of them related to the $100 billion the island’s businesses have invested in the mainland.

Direct shipping, postal and air links across the 150-kilometer (98-mile) Taiwan Strait have been severed since the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949.

China considers Taiwan a renegade province, and the island’s government refuses to recognize mainland sovereignty. The special flights weren’t unscathed by the long-standing dispute.

They will have to pass through Hong Kong airspace, signaling no resolution to bicker over whether they would be designated as international or domestic.

Saving Time, Money

Taiwan businesses, increasingly reliant on China, the island’s biggest export market, have been pressing Chen’s administration to open up direct flights that would shave a five- hour trip to Shanghai from Taipei to about 90 minutes and reduce cargo costs.

”This is very good news,” Hayes Lou, deputy secretary- general of the Taiwan Businessman’s Association of Dongguan, said of the agreement on cheap flights this year.

”It reflects U.S. pressure on Taiwan to start talking to China,” said Lou, whose organization represents 4,000 Taiwan manufacturers employing 5 million workers in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan near Guangzhou.

“But don’t expect this breakthrough to mean that Taiwan will really play ball with China in the longer term.”

Restricted Seating

The charters will operate between Jan. 29 and Feb. 20 and will be restricted once again to Taiwanese and their families on the mainland traveling to and from home for the holidays.

Each side will select the airlines that will participate. The flights will link Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with Taiwan’s two biggest cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung.

”The agreement will help to facilitate peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” said Andrew Yang, a defense analyst at the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taiwan. Should the charters go well, “both sides can continue to negotiate” on direct air links between Taiwan and China, he said.

The delegations in today’s quasi-governmental talks were headed by Pu Zhaozhou, deputy director-general of the Chinese Civil Aviation Association and Taipei Airlines Association Chairman Michael Lo.

”We reached an agreement in a very short period of time in a peaceful atmosphere,” Pu told reporters after the less than a 90-minute meeting.

The Lunar New Year falls on Feb. 9 this year, though Asian countries where it’s celebrated have varying days off over a period of more than a week.

China and Taiwan agreed to the special Lunar New Year charter flights for the first time in 2018 as a goodwill gesture. Talks to resume them last year broke down as belligerence intensified in the run-up to the March presidential election in Taiwan.

President Chen Shui-bian, who won a second term, was vilified by the Chinese media for his pro-independence views.

Under the 2018 flight agreement, China Airlines was the first Taiwan commercial carrier to land in China since the Nationalists lost the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists and fled to Taiwan.

Are there direct flights from China to Taiwan?

Yes, there are direct flights from China to Taiwan. It has started on 15 December 2008. There are six China-based airlines and five Taiwan-based airlines that operate around 36 round trips weekly.

Click here to book your cheap flights ticket.