2011-01-12 13:44

BEIJING - Last year witnessed growing momentum in the peaceful development of ties between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, a mainland Taiwan affairs spokesperson said Wednesday.

Fan Liqing, spokesperson for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a regular press conference in Beijing, that the mainland and Taiwan authorities had advanced mutual understanding and maintained sound interaction during 2010.

Meetings between the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) and Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) had been institutionalized and three agreements, including the cross-Straits Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), were signed.

Fan said cross-Straits trade had boomed. Trade volume from January to November 2010 totaled a record high of $131.7 billion, an increase of 39.7 percent year-on-year.

Over the same period, the mainland had approved 2,727 investment projects from Taiwan, an increase of 21.9 percent year-on-year. And 47 mainland corporations had invested $137 million in their Taiwan-based businesses, with mainland investors in Taiwan increasing to 63.

Cross-Straits financial cooperation also made headway, said Fan. Six Taiwan banks have been approved to open branches in the mainland, and five of them had started businesses. Three banks from the mainland also got approval to run representative offices in Taiwan.

Fan also noted that progress had been made in people-to-people exchanges in the past year. From January to November, 4.68 million residents from Taiwan visited the mainland, up by 13.6 percent, and 1.49 million mainland residents visited Taiwan, up by 69.6 percent year-on-year.

Some 1.16 million mainland tourists visited Taiwan during the past year, a year-on-year increase of 92.6 percent. The mainland had become the largest source of tourists for Taiwan, said Fan.