Nearly 70 years after the Kuomintang regime's flight to Taiwan, the descendants of those who moved are attempting to discover their mainland roots, as Li Lei reports.

The end of the Chinese Civil War (1946-49) saw an estimated 1 million soldiers and civilians loyal to the Nationalist Kuomintang flee the Chinese mainland and decamp to Taiwan.

Nearly four decades of confrontation followed, and cross-Straits relations only began to thaw in the late 1980s.

However, when Taiwan allowed members of the so-called displaced generation to visit the mainland after 38 years, many were unable to locate their long-lost relatives.

Now, as members of the original group begin to die off, many of their descendants are attempting to find their families in the mainland.

Fang Chih-peng, a 45-year-old lecturer in tourism and leisure management at the China University of Technology in Hsinchu, Taiwan, is part of the younger generation that has reconnected with family members across the Taiwan Straits.

"My mother told me that if my father had lived to see the day when people in Taiwan were allowed to visit their relatives in the mainland, he would have been the first to purchase a ticket and go home," he said.

In 1949, Fang's grandfather, a grain retailer in Nanjing, Jiangsu province - the capital under the Kuomintang - asked a relative in the Nationalist army to look after his 12-year-old son Fang Decai, who was later to become the father of Fang Chih-peng.

The boy was taken to Taiwan as the Kuomintang retreated, but his father promised they would be reunited when peace was restored. However, Fang Decai, who died in 1975, never saw the mainland again.

"For my father, going home was out of the question," said Fang Chihpeng. "My father died when I was age 2, but later, the idea came to me to honor him by finding our relatives in the mainland."

Fang Chih-peng began searching in 2010, but it wasn't until seven years later, in December, that he finally located two elderly uncles - the youngest was 71 - and two aunts in Nanjing.

The breakthrough came after Fang Chih-peng saw a television report about Jinri Toutiao, a news aggregator app that had started a program to help displaced Kuomintang members and their descendants in Taiwan reconnect with relatives in the mainland.

The app sent messages from Taiwan residents to users in the mainland asking for information about the likely whereabouts of potential relatives and requesting details of possible family links.

Fang Chih-peng struck gold when an alert was sent to users in parts of Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, where he believed his relatives were living. Confirmation of the existence of family members in Nanjing came just four hours after the message was sent out.

He was delighted by the response. Not only had he achieved his father's desire to reunite the family, but he had answered a question that had been bothering him for years - "Where do I come from?"

"Now I can speak with confidence when my children ask me that question and I can tell them the history of their bloodline," he said.

According to Jinri Toutiao, all 50 Taiwan residents who asked for help are descendants of people who moved in 1949, and more than 60 percent of the older generation has already died.

Fraught atmosphere