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Sylvie Zhuang

The mainland Chinese authorities have lifted a pandemic-era ban on travel to Taiwan, allowing tour groups from Shanghai and Fujian province to visit the island.
The Culture and Tourism Ministry said preparations were “actively under way” – although there is no timetable for visits to resume – and the move would help normalise cross-strait exchanges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday.
All outbound group trips from mainland China, including to Taiwan, were halted at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Beijing started allowing overseas group tours again in 2023 and since then travel has resumed to most destinations, including the United States and much of Europe.
But cross-strait travel has fallen down the list of priorities as a result of ongoing political tensions between Beijing and Taipei.
In February last year, Taipei delayed a plan that could allow local agencies to organise tour groups to mainland China, citing the failure by Beijing to allow group tours to the island.
Fujian in southeast China sits on the opposite site of the Taiwan Strait to the island and its geography has made it the focal point of Beijing’s push for integration. In April last year, Beijing signalled that Fujian residents would be the first allowed to visit Taiwan once group travel resumed.


Meanwhile, Shanghai, the mainland’s biggest economic powerhouse, is a major destination for Taiwanese investment and has hosted the Twin-City Forum with Taipei every year since 2010.
Chen Binhua, a spokesman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, told Xinhua the decision to allow group tours to resume “responds to the fervent desire of compatriots on both sides of the strait to strengthen exchanges”.
He also urged the island’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to lift its own ban on group tours to the mainland, remove its travel warnings and restore direct passenger flights and routes to “create favourable conditions for cross-strait exchanges”.
Last June Taipei raised its travel warning for mainland China – as well as Hong Kong and Macau – from yellow to orange, saying new judicial guidelines that could carry the death penalty for “diehard separatists” were a “severe threat” to the personal safety of Taiwanese residents.


Orange is the second-highest alert level in the four-tier system and advises against all “unnecessary travel”.
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China and has never renounced the use of force to reunify it with the mainland. Most countries, including the United States, the island’s main international partner, do not recognise Taiwan as independent, but Washington opposes any forcible reunification.
Relations started declining when the independence-leading DPP came to power in 2016, prompting both sides to impose restrictions on travel to the opposite side of the strait.
Beijing has also ramped up military pressure and staged drills in the Taiwan Strait, especially since the DPP’s William Lai Ching-te took office as the island’s leader in May.
Beijing stopped allowing individual tourist visits in 2019, citing the deterioration in relations – a ban that has still not been lifted.
The pandemic led to further severe restrictions on travel on both sides but Taipei ended its controls in October 2022.
Chen told a press conference on Wednesday that there had been just over 4.4 million cross-strait visits in 2024, a 54 per cent increase on the previous year’s total, more than 4 million of which were trips from Taiwan to the mainland.


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News

China

Politics

Groups from Fujian and Shanghai are the first to be allowed to visit the island in a move Beijing says will help ‘strengthen exchanges’


Groups from Fujian and Shanghai are the first to be allowed to visit the island in a move Beijing says will help ‘strengthen exchanges’.


Chinese tourists

Tourism