It is dawn at Taipei international airport. Bedlam reigns. Passengers checking in for China Airlines Flight 7957 are mobbed by television crews. They take group pictures of themselves waving tickets. Everyone wants to be photographed by the windows overlooking the Airbus 330-300 with butterfly orchids painted on its fuselage.

Ringo Chao, the chairman of the Taiwanese carrier, hands out souvenir stamps as the passengers board.

“We’ve waited so long for this. This is a new era,” he tells a mêlée of journalists minutes before the plane soars skywards and into the history books.

Flight 7957, bound for Shanghai, is the first regular commercial flight from Taiwan to mainland China since Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces fled to the island after their defeat by Mao Zedong’s Red Army in 1949. It is one of 36 direct flights that will now cross the Taiwan Strait every weekend — and the most concrete manifestation yet of the greatly reduced tensions in one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints for six decades.

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People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are hoping that direct flights will move them away from hostilities

Jane Macartney

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The 313 passengers bubble with excitement. “It makes me feel I’m part of history,” said Steve Po Hang Yang, 23, one of 35 Taiwanese students chosen to visit Shanghai colleges. “I heard about this flight and said I had to be on it,” said Alex Liu, 51, a Taiwanese contractor from Los Angeles, who flew home specially.

Technically, Beijing and Taiwan are still in a state of war. China has more than 1,000 missiles aimed at Taiwan and has repeatedly threatened to invade should what it regards as a renegade province declare independence.

In May, however, a new President, Ma Ying-jeou, took office in Taipei, promising co-operation with Taiwan’s giant neighbour instead of the confrontation of Chen Shui-bian, his predecessor. Mr Ma, 57 and Harvard-educated, wants to boost the faltering Taiwanese economy through closer business, trade and tourist links with the emerging superpower. The Communist leaders of Beijing want to improve China’s international image before the Olympics. The result has been dramatic.

High-level talks have resumed for the first time since 1998. Mr Ma has relaxed restrictions on Taiwanese investment in mainland China, tripled to 3,000 the number of Chinese who can visit Taiwan each day and declared the yuan a convertible currency.

He has given Chinese journalists greater access to Taipei. He is ending the practice of paying impoverished little countries exorbitant sums to recognise Taiwan, not China (only 23 do so). He has reversed his predecessor’s decision to reject Beijing’s offer of two pandas because the creatures’ names together read “Unity”. Taiwan’s generous aid after the Sichuan earthquake also earned it great goodwill.

The flights to and from five mainland cities are the most potent symbol of the present thaw and Mr Ma hopes that by 2012 four million Chinese a year will visit what they have long regarded as a forbidden island. Hotels are being built in anticipation. Airports and tourist sites are being spruced up. Great efforts were made to ensure that the 700 Chinese arrivals yesterday felt welcome. The first flight was greeted with traditional lion dances and the visitors were invited to a banquet last night. The authorities have also pledged to stop anti-communist activists harassing mainlanders.

Mr Ma is not talking of reunification and says that negotiations on a peace accord can only begin when China removes its missiles. For now, he seeks detente. Critics claim that in his rush to improve relations with Beijing he is compromising Taiwanese autonomy, security and dignity. They doubt that Beijing will allow Taiwan the observer status at the World Health Organisation that it craves. Reports this week suggested that Beijing was quietly deploying improved missile systems opposite Taiwan as it resumed high-level talks with Taipei.

There is also the question of whether closer contacts will foster greater friendship — or the opposite.

Mr Ma said recently that the more the contacts the more “the chances of hostilities will continue to decrease”. Privately, the Taiwanese are scathing about mainland Chinese. They say that they have been coarsened by 60 years of communism. “They are loud, spit and jump queues,” one said. They say that Chinese tourists are cheapskates who drive away high-spending Japanese visitors, import diseases such as Sars and might attempt to remain in Taiwan illegally.

At least one top hotel has barred Chinese tour groups. Another separates Chinese from Japanese. A health inspector had to apologise after saying that places visited by Chinese tourists would have to be disinfected. Chinese tourist chiefs responded by urging their compatriots to “comport themselves with dignity” and do nothing to “harm cross-Strait relations”.

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