China's top negotiator with Taiwan aims to send senior envoys to attend his counterpart's funeral, the state Xinhua news agency said on Sunday, a day after the rivals marked their first non-stop flights in over 55 years. It was not immediately clear if Taipei had sanctioned the move, which would be the first visit since the late 1990s by high-level Chinese officials to an island they regard as a renegade province.
Wang Daohan, who heads the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, planned to send two representatives to the funeral of Koo Chen-fu, the chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation who died earlier this month, Xinhua said.
Those two organisations handle relations in the absence of official ties. Wang intended for his Association's vice-president Sun Yafu and secretary-general Li Yafei to travel to the island in his stead, Xinhua said.
Wang had planned to visit Taiwan in 1999, but scrapped that idea after Taiwan's then-president Lee Teng-hui infuriated Beijing by redefining ties as "special state-to-state" relations.
Wang's envoys - due to leave Shanghai February 1 - would act as his "personal representatives" and avoid cross-Strait issues, Xinhua quoted Chen Yunlin, director of the cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office, as pledging on Sunday.
They are due to return on February 2, Xinhua quoted Chen as saying, without specifying a date for the funeral.
Koo, a prominent business tycoon, died of cancer on January 3, prompting Beijing to offer condolences from afar and hark back to an era of less strained cross-Strait ties.