New preferential policies on Taiwan released

The Chinese mainland on Sunday introduced a slew of preferential policies to boost cross-Straits exchanges with a focus on improving the lives of the Taiwanese.

Unveiled at the fifth Straits Forum in southeast China's Xiamen City, the 31 polices regarded legal rights, education, culture, tourism and other aspects of economic and social life.

The Supreme People's Court will unveil judicial interpretation for recognizing and implementing the paper of civil mediation followed by Taiwan authorities at village, township and city levels, announced Zhang Zhijun, director of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council.

To offer more convenience for Taiwanese visitors, an additional 11 provincial entry-exit administrative departments on the mainland will accept applications from Taiwanese compatriots who reside on the mainland for renewal of their entry permits, Zhang added.

Nine such departments already offered the service.

The mainland will also open 10 more categories of professional qualification examinations to Taiwan residents, support Taiwanese graduates from mainland colleges to start their own businesses, and provide subsidies for entrepreneurship training to students from Taiwan.

According to Zhang, 10 cultural exchanges bases will be set up on the mainland in Henan, Fujian and Beijing.

He said that another 11 historical sites will also play the role of cross-Straits communication bases, including the Confucius Temple in east China's Shandong Province, and some revolutionary relic sites in central Hubei Province and southwest Chongqing Municipality.

The official, who did not specify when any of these new policies would take effect, added that a cross-Straits copyright trade center as well as a digital publication base working across the Strait will be established in Fujian.

In order to boost cross-Strait tourism, residents of 13 more mainland cities will be eligible to visit Taiwan as individual tourists under a new cross-Strait agreement, according to Shao Qiwei, head of the National Tourism Administration.

The 13 cities, including Shenyang, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Suzhou, Ningbo, Qingdao, Shijiazhuang, Changchun, Hefei, Changsha, Nanning, Kunming and Quanzhou, will extend the list of such mainland cities to 26.

The fifth Straits Forum opened on Sunday and is scheduled to wrap up on June 21 in Xiamen, a port city at the western side of Taiwan Strait.

It features an array of activities on grassroots exchanges between Taiwan and the mainland, including a main conference in Xiamen as well as sub-forums and seminars in cities across the province.

Mainland-Taiwan relations entered a tense era after the Kuomintang (KMT) lost a civil war with the Communist Party of China and fled to Taiwan in the late 1940s.

But relations between the two warmed up after the KMT, led by a new generation of leaders, returned to power in the 2008 Taiwan election, ending eight years of rule by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.