Taiwan

Straits Forum attracts wide participation

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2011-06-11 21:13

XIAMEN, Fujian - More than 10,000 people in Taiwan are expected to cross the Taiwan Straitss to attend a week-long forum to be held in the mainland's southeastern city of Xiamen starting Saturday evening, organizers said.

The annual Straits Forum, now in its third year, will focus on "grassroots exchanges" across the Taiwan Straits, said Deng Benyuan, a senior Taiwan affairs official from southeast China's Fujian Province.

Deng said the forum will feature cultural exchanges, cooking demonstrations, performances by ethnic minorities, temple fairs and other activities in Xiamen and eight other cities in Fujian.

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Kuomintang (KMT) Vice Chairman Tseng Yung-chuan and Taiwan's Taoyuan County Magistrate John Chih-Yang Wu arrived in Xiamen on Friday to participate in the forum. Wu will discuss Taoyuan's investment environment on the sidelines of the forum.

Senior leaders and representatives of Taiwan's People First Party, New Party and Non-Partisan Solidarity Union will also attend the forum.

Taiwanese celebrities performed in a grand gala on Saturday night following a short opening ceremony.

Deng said that the event's 16 sub-forums, which will be hosted by civil society groups from both sides of the Straits, will focus on exchanges pertaining to labor unions, technology, finance and traditional Chinese medicine.

More than 100 towns and villages from both sides of the Straits will use the sub-forums to discuss postal exchanges, quality control and the maritime industry.

In order to ensure broad representation for the forum, the closing ceremony will be held Friday in Taiwan's city of Taichung, the island's third largest city, organizers said.

A Taiwanese temple fair opened on Xiamen's bustling Zhongshan Road on Friday, with members of the island's minority groups presenting folk dances and Xiamen locals tasting Taiwan delicacies at a night fair.

Staff at the Xiamen airport used the Minnan dialect, a branch of the Chinese language shared by people from Taiwan and Fujian, to welcome Taiwanese visitors flying into the airport to attend the forum.

On Fujian's Meizhou Island, more than 1,000 followers of Matsu, an ancient goddess of the sea, prayed for peace and prosperity during the forum's Matsu Culture Week, which also kicked off on Saturday.

A ceremony paying tribute to Zheng Chenggong, a naval general who forced Dutch invaders to leave Taiwan in the 18th century, will be held on Sunday.

Zheng, who died at the age of 38 in southern Taiwan, lived in Xiamen for 14 years and based his naval forces there.

Fan Liqing, spokeswoman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, said last month that the forum would feature the participation of community leaders from central and southern Taiwan and promote cooperation between villages and towns on both sides of the Straits.

Fan said she hoped that mainlanders would learn more about Taiwan through the forum, and that the forum would become a platform for Taiwan's small and medium-sized enterprises to explore the mainland market.

"Taiwan applicants have enthusiastically signed up for the forum," she said, adding that the number of people attendance would be an increase over the previous two forums.

The Straits Forum is an annual event, kicking off on the second Saturday of June each year, organizers said.

This year, more than 1,200 reporters from nearly 200 media organizations will cover the forum, a vast increase over the amount of media coverage received during previous forums, said Zhu Qing, director of the information office of the Fujian provincial government.

Zhu pledged to provide "convenience" for Taiwanese reporters covering the forum.

The forum also serves as a platform for the announcement of economic and trade policies that will benefit both sides of the Straits.

During the first cross-Straits forum, which was held from May 16 to 22, 2009, the Chinese mainland announced the opening of five extra ports for direct shipping services to Taiwan, bringing the total number of Taiwan-mainland ports to 68.

At the second forum, which was held from June 19 to 25 last year, airlines from both sides of the Straits agreed to slash cross-Straits airfares by 10 to 15 percent to encourage travel between the two regions.

Xiamen, a coastal city with a population of 2.52 million, was a flash point for cross-Straits rivalries in the 1950s and 1960s, after the Kuomintang lost a civil war with the Communist Party of China (CPC) and fled to Taiwan in the late 1940s.

Cross-Straitss exchanges warmed after the KMT, led by a new generation of leaders, returned to power in the 2008 Taiwan election, ending eight years of rule by Chen Shui-bian and the Democratic Progressive Party.