A top government official yesterday said mainland Chinese tourists would not be able to visit Taiwan any time soon as Beijing still needed to officially list Taiwan as an approved tourist destination and iron out other technical details.

Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) vice chairman Liu Te-shun made the remarks after China issued new rules allowing mainland tourists to visit Taiwan, in a sign Beijing is continuing with its overtures to woo the island economically The new rules reported in China's state media yesterday allow authorized mainland travel agencies to organize group tours to Taiwan. Taiwan travel services must also win approval from Chinese agencies to host mainland tourists. Liu urged Beijing to place Taiwan on a PRC government list of destinations that Chinese tourists are officially allowed to visit. He also urged the Chinese authorities to hold talks with Taiwan's government on related technical details, including identity authentication and repatriation of overstaying Chinese tourists. "We really hope China can make good on its words," Liu said, adding Beijing had promised to open up its tourist market to Taiwan a year ago. It is unclear if Beijing will soon respond to these demands. The Chinese government in the past has shunned the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration in favor of groups that are more pro-China. Liu said China's current sightseeing rules were incomplete. "I hope China will not do things step-by-step again and in future will settle an issue as a whole," Liu said. He also said China's new tourist rules and Taiwan's accompanying tourist rules were not in sync, with differences of opinion.

For example, Liu said, local tourist agencies did not understand why they needed to get approval from mainland China to host a Chinese tourism delegation. Beijing, for its part, appeared to want Taiwanese tourist agencies to win authorization from its government for moral rather than political reasons. The Chinese tourist agencies "must require host (Taiwan) agencies do not lead or organize tourists to take part in any activities involving gambling, licentiousness or drugs," Beijing's rules said. Both China and Taiwan place tight restrictions on mainland visits to the island. The trickle of mainlanders now able to travel there is tiny compared to the 4.1 million trips to the mainland last year by Taiwan people, many of them investors. The tourism rules were issued by the Chinese government on Sunday -- a day after China announced possible aviation, agriculture and finance concessions to Taiwan -- as a goodwill gesture in the wake of Kuomintang (KMT) honorary chairman Lien Chan's visit. Hotels operators, boat tour companies and managers of an aboriginal theme part in the Sun Moon Lake area -- a favorite destination of Chinese tourists -- were happy to hear that Beijing had made further steps towards allowing its tourists to visit the island. They would upgrade their facilities in response, they said. Huang Rui-chi, the manager of the Nine Tribes aboriginal park, near Sun Moon Lake, said all the park's printed materials, such as information on its web site and guide booklets, would be translated into simplified Chinese characters used in the mainland. Late last year, the head of China's National Tourism Administration visited Taiwan. Taiwan's independence-leaning President Chen Shui-bian has previously warily welcomed the prospect of mainland tourists, saying the island could take 1,000 Chinese tourists a day and might allow them to stay up to 10 days. But there have been no formal negotiations over the issue between the two sides.