Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inspection of the Pingtan Comprehensive Pilot Zone on Nov 1 has triggered extensive media coverage, with many optimistic about Pingtan’s future.

Taiwan’s Want Daily reviewed Xi’s trip to Pingtan, and highlighted his meetings with Taiwanese enterprises and tourists. By doing that, the President shows a kind gesture to Taiwan, commented the newspaper.

United Daily News, also a Taiwanese newspaper, echoed the sentiment and hailed Xi’s man-of-the-people style. It also mentioned Pingtan as an experimental area for cross-Straits cooperation, building a “Common Homeland” for people from across the Straits.

Pingtan is the “bridgehead” of cross-Straits communication. Xi chose Pingtan as his first stop of inspection to Fujian province showing that the central authorities will make Fujian’s competitiveness in cross-Straits communication even stronger in future, said a commentary in the Hong Kong based Wenwei Po Newspaper on Nov 2.

The article added that Pingtan provides possibilities of joint development and management of certain projects by the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. And Xi’s remarks on cross-Straits cooperation indicate two messages: the first is that the Chinese mainland will continue to promote cross-Straits economic and trade cooperation. The mainland still has enough room for Taiwanese investment. The second is that the central authorities on the mainland will further endorse Pingtan as an innovator of more cross-Straits cooperation.

Beijing Business Today speculated in a Nov 3 article that Pingtan will get more support from the central authorities and will likely be included in the list of China’s second batch of free trade zones.

Xi noted during the inspection that Pingtan faces a golden opportunity that “comes around in a millennium, rather than century”, which increases that likelihood, the newspaper quoted Wang Jun, deputy director of the Consulting and Research Department of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, as saying.