A delegation of Chinese students arrives in Taiwan for the first time in three years to defuse tensions

July 15 (EUROPA PRESS) –

A delegation of Chinese students arrived in Taiwan this Saturday on a nine-day academic visit, the first of its kind in three years, in a gesture of appeasing relations between the two parties after months of new tensions.

The group, made up of 37 students from five leading Chinese universities, has come at the invitation of former Taiwanese president Ma Ying Jeou.

“This is the first visit of this caliber since cross-strait exchanges were suspended and relations deteriorated to the brink of war,” Hsiao Hsu Tsen, director of the Ma Ying Jeou Foundation, explained in statements this Saturday. collected by the ‘South China Morning Post’.

Ties between China and the island of Taiwan, which Beijing considers another province under its sovereignty, broke in 1949, after the forces of the nationalist Kuomintang party suffered a defeat in the civil war against the Communist Party and relocated to the archipelago. Relations were re-established only at the business and informal level in the late 1980s.

The group’s visit will be closely watched by authorities, including security and immigration units, as well as the Mainland Affairs Council, the cross-Strait policy planner, amid fears of possible espionage by part of Beijing

In fact, and as the ‘SCMP’ recalls, the Taiwanese authorities took until Tuesday to finally approve the group’s visitor requests, sent on June 8.