Media shows renewed interest in cross-Straits talks

During the course of my not-so-long career as a reporter, I had come to feel I had experienced the phenomenon of media enthusiasm, having witnessed many high-level, even top-level meetings.

However, on Tuesday, I attended a landmark meeting between the heads of cross-Straits affairs from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and I realized I had been wrong.

The formal meeting between Zhang Zhijun, head of the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, and Wang Yu-chi, Taiwan's mainland affairs chief, was scheduled to take place at the Purple Palace Hotel in Nanjing.

An hour before the event, which was to be a first for cross-Straits relations, about 200 reporters arrived at the venue. The reporters crowded into the lobby before undergoing security checks.

Many of the reporters attending, including those with more experience than me, were also amazed by the situation and documented the scene with their cameras and mobile phones.

More than 200 reporters from China and abroad are reported to have registered for the media event. More than 80 of them were from the Chinese mainland and more than 60 were from Taiwan.

The Taiwan authorities said they had asked airlines to lay on extra flights to accommodate the huge number of reporters.

The presence of so many enthusiastic reporters speaking different languages and Chinese dialects made the big meeting room seem very small. They continually negotiated and competed for the best spots from which to witness the historic moment.

Camera shutters clicked incessantly throughout the first 10 minutes of the meeting, which reporters were allowed to observe.

It isn't so hard to understand the great importance news media attached to the event, considering the historic process it represents.

It took Wang only more than two hours to fly directly from Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport to Nanjing in Jiangsu province on Tuesday morning. But it took more than six decades for senior officials in charge of cross-Straits affairs to sit around the same table for a formal meeting.

However, the lack of formal contacts between the two cross-Straits bodies does not mean relations between Taiwan and the mainland have been distant. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In 2013, trade between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan reached $197.2 billion. The mainland has been the biggest source of tourists to Taiwan, with nearly 2.19 million mainland tourists visiting the island last year, 11 percent more than in 2012.

Wang Ming-yi, a correspondent from Taiwan's China Times, said the trade volume between the mainland and Taiwan is even larger than that between Britain or Russia and the mainland. Many practical issues between the two sides remain to be addressed if they are to resolve the bottleneck in relations.

"What attracted so many reporters, even some foreign ones from Japan and the United States, is not necessarily the content of the meeting, but the breakthrough of a new communication channel between the mainland and Taiwan," said Wang, who has been covering cross-Straits relations for more than two decades.

The new mood of dialogue is reflected in the fact that Wang, Taiwan's mainland affairs chief, is scheduled to give a speech at Nanjing University on Wednesday.

In 1990, Wang was part of a team of students from National Taiwan University who won the finals of the annual Asian varsities debate in Singapore. His opponents in the final battle were from Nanjing University.

Wang also had an opportunity to teach in Nanjing University after he gained his doctoral degree, Taiwan's TVBS reported.

Another Taiwan correspondent told me that there is not so much media attention surrounding meetings between the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation, because they become a regular event.

I think the same thing may eventually happen with the meetings between Zhang and Wang.

In response to a question about whether the two bodies in charge of cross-Straits affairs will establish a hotline in the future, Wang joked, "Today we have mobile phones, and we can just make a call, so long as we have each other's numbers."

Contact the writer at zhaoshengnan@chinadaily.com.cn