China Shrugs off Rival Taiwan's Slap Against its Airlines



TAIPEI —
China is responding coolly for now to an unusual blow against Chinese airlines from its political rival Taiwan .

On Friday, Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration froze applications from China Eastern and Xiamen Air to add a combined 176 flights during the Lunar New Year holiday next month. Both airlines are based in China.高松から上海航空券

The halt to those applications follows venting in Taipei over China’s unilateral launch January 4 of four new civilian aviation routes in the shared Taiwan Strait. Taiwan says the routes will let aircraft pass dangerously close to its own airspace.

Lack of added holiday flights will fluster mainly home-bound Taiwanese business people and the island’s tourism arrivals rather than Beijing itself, so China sees no need to retaliate right away, analysts say.

"I do not expect further escalation," said Lin Chong-pin, a strategic studies professor retired from Tamkang University in Taiwan."There’s no point of going further."

Still, the freezing of new flights jolts Beijing’s already tough bid to draw the Taiwan government of President Tsai Ing-wen into formal talks on the premise that both belong to a single country.

China and Taiwan have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s, but China claims sovereignty over the island and insists on eventual unification. Opinion surveys show most Taiwanese oppose that goal.

Tsai rejects Beijing’s "one-China" condition for dialogue, which could be a possible conduit toward unification.