China has allowed access to Internet versions of two of Taiwan's top daily newspapers after blocking them for years for fear they would spread anti-Communist propaganda, a Taiwan official, quoted by a Reuters report, said.
The Reuters report quoting Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council also said that users in the populous Pearl River Delta and other parts of China over the past two weeks had accessed previously blocked Web sites run by the China Times (news.chinatimes.com) and the United Daily News (http://udn.com/NEWS/)
A search of the sites in Beijing found the United Daily was accessible but the China Times was still blocked.
The Taiwan government had appealed for more than a year to get the bans lifted, the report said.
'China is facing pressure from its own citizens,' Mainland Affairs Council spokeswoman Corinna Wei was quoted as saying.
China sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory, and Beijing routinely blocks Internet sites that go against the government view on sensitive topics such as its ever tense relations with the island, the report said.
China has threatened to attack Taiwan if it does not eventually reunify, but over the past two years it has taken a softer public relations approach to win favor with Taiwan citizens, the report said.
Both the newspapers which have been unblocked lean toward the Nationalist Party, or KMT, a former Communist enemy that in recent years has taken a conciliatory view toward China as economic ties grow.