Historic China-Taiwan talks start long road to closer ties

China and Taiwan are gearing up for their first government-to-government meeting in more than six decades Tuesday -- but analysts say renewed political ties between the former bitter rivals may still be a long way off.

The Taiwanese government’s Wang Yu-chi, who oversees the island’s China policy, is scheduled to fly to the mainland on February 11 to meet his counterpart Zhang Zhijun, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office chief, for talks set to last until February 14.

The meeting in Nanjing, in China’s eastern Jiangsu province, is the fruit of years of efforts to normalise relations and marks the first official contact between sitting governments since the pair’s acrimonious split in 1949.

That year, two million supporters of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan--officially known as Republic of China--after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists.

Ever since, the island and the mainland have been governed separately, both claiming to be the true government of China, only re-establishing contact in the 1990s through quasi-official organisations.

When the much-anticipated visit was announced at a January press conference, Taiwan’s Wang said it had “crucial implications for further institutionalisation of the ties between the two sides of the Straits”.