Taiwan hots up

Taiwan is wooing property investors in a bid to cash in on China's breakneck economic growth.

The country's in-coming president Ma Ying-jeou invited a group of Chinese property tycoons, many of them self made billionaires, to look at investment potential on the island.

This comes amid predictions that hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists will flock to the island and a time when the government is eager to boost trade ties with Beijing.

They say they will look into leisure and tourism investments in anticipation of hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists flocking to the island.

Tourism and leisure developments have a lot of potential according Liu Changle, a developer and chairman of Hong Kong-based Phoenix Satellite Television. 'Taiwan has an important property market in the Greater China and Asian region,' he said.

Sites on the group's itinerary included a 46 billion New Taiwan dollars (US$1.5 billion; €1 billion) commercial-leisure complex in the central city of Taichung and a NT$10 billion (US$330 million; €210million) yachting-theme park complex near a bay in the southern city of Pingtung.

Ma's ambitions include increasing annual Chinese tourist flows to Taiwan from the current level of 80,000 to one million and direct flights across the 160-kilometer-wide (100-mile-wide) Taiwan Strait.

Those goals were endorsed by Chinese President Hu Jintao during a breakthrough meeting with Taiwan's incoming vice president last month on the Chinese island of Hainan.

Group member Pan Shiyi of Soho China said the prospect of thousands of new Chinese tourists visiting Taiwan makes the island an especially alluring target for hotel and other leisure-related investments.

'We have 1.3 billion Chinese," he said. 'If they can get here by direct flights I think there will be a lot of interest in that.'

Aside from holiday charters, direct flights across the Taiwan Strait have been banned since China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949. China continues to claim Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened war if it moves to make its de facto independence permanent. So Western property investors are unlikely to be rushing to Ilha Formosa, the 'beautiful island'.

However Ma, who takes office on May 20, is serious about bringing the country onto the global stage. He is seeking to expand the existing holiday charters to weekends and launch regularly scheduled flights during the second half of 2009.

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