About Taihai Net

Taihai Net

Taihai Net (台海网, taihainet.com) is an online news portal based in Xiamen, Fujian, operated within the Xiamen Daily media group. Published in Chinese, it focuses on Taiwan affairs and cross-strait relations alongside Xiamen and Fujian local news, economy and culture coverage, drawing on Xiamen's position as a principal mainland gateway to Taiwan. The site aggregates reporting from mainland and Taiwan media and publishes original cross-strait commentary and service information for readers and businesses on both sides of the strait. Its name — 台海, Taiwan and the sea, the Taiwan Strait itself — states its beat more plainly than any slogan could. From a city where the Taiwan-administered Kinmen Islands lie about ten kilometres offshore, visible across the water, Taihai Net reports the strait as local news: ferries and flights, trade and tourism, families and forums, and the politics that governs them all.

A portal named for the strait

Taihai Net's recorded identity combines a place, a group and a subject. The place is Xiamen, the Fujian port city on the Taiwan Strait. The group is the Xiamen Daily media group, the municipal newspaper group whose flagship is Xiamen Daily — the portal operates within that group as its strait-facing news site. The subject is Taiwan affairs and cross-strait relations, covered alongside Xiamen and Fujian local news, economy and culture. Most Chinese city portals lead with their city; Taihai Net leads with a relationship. That choice reflects the reality of Xiamen, where Taiwan is not foreign news but the defining fact of local geography, economy and family life — and it gives the portal a readership that ordinary prefecture sites do not have: readers in Taiwan itself, and mainland readers anywhere whose business is the strait.

Xiamen: the gateway city

The city behind the portal explains its mission. Xiamen is a seaside city in southeastern Fujian, administering six districts — Siming, Huli, Jimei, Haicang, Tong'an and Xiang'an — over a land area of about 1,700 square kilometres. It faces the Kinmen Islands across the water and looks toward Taiwan and the Penghu Islands across the Taiwan Strait. Xiamen has been a trading port since ancient times and a gateway for China's opening to the world: it was one of the five treaty ports opened under the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, was known to Westerners as Amoy, and in October 1980 became one of China's first special economic zones — established on 2.5 square kilometres, expanded to the whole of Xiamen Island in 1984, and extended to the entire city in 2010. Its deep, ice-free natural harbour made it an international port city, and its Gulangyu Island, the historic international settlement across from Xiamen Island, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2017. A cross-strait portal in this city is reporting from the mainland's front porch.

Kinmen across the water

No fact shapes Taihai Net's coverage more than proximity. The Kinmen Islands, administered by Taiwan, lie roughly ten kilometres from Xiamen. Since 2001, the Mini Three Links — direct trade, transport and postal connections between Kinmen and Matsu and the Fujian coast — have tied the islands to Xiamen by ferry, and policy has built toward a Xiamen-Kinmen common living circle, announced in 2019, deepening economic, social and infrastructural integration; Xiamen's mayor said in January 2026 that efforts would accelerate to make that living circle real, and projects including a Xiamen-Jinmen (Kinmen) bridge are intended to end the era when Kinmen residents depended on ferries and weather. Kinmen residents study, work, marry and do business in Xiamen in significant numbers. For Taihai Net, this is neighbourhood reporting: ferry schedules, entry policies, and the daily texture of two communities growing into one living circle are its home news.

What Taihai Net publishes

The portal's recorded model mixes aggregation and original work. It aggregates reporting from mainland and Taiwan media — a necessary function for cross-strait news, where each side's press reports the other constantly but readers rarely see both — and it publishes original cross-strait commentary and service information for readers and businesses on both sides of the strait. Around that core it carries Xiamen and Fujian local news, economy and culture coverage: the port and the special economic zone, the city's districts and development, and the Minnan culture that Xiamen shares with southern Fujian and with Taiwan itself, whose population is largely descended from Minnan emigrants. Service information — the rules, routes and procedures for travelling, studying, working and investing across the strait — is a practical pillar of the site, aimed at the Taiwan compatriots and mainland businesses whose movements it exists to serve.

The Straits Forum and Xiamen's exchange calendar

Xiamen's cross-strait role is institutional as well as geographic. The Straits Forum, the largest mainland-hosted platform for grassroots exchanges between the two sides, has been held in Xiamen since 2009; its 18th edition, in June 2026, drew more than 6,000 participants from Taiwan across dozens of activities in community, youth, cultural and economic exchange, and the forum has attracted more than 100,000 Taiwanese participants since it began. Events of that scale, and the year-round calendar of cross-strait conferences, trade fairs and cultural exchanges in Xiamen — including new cross-strait e-commerce express shipping lines between Xiamen Port and Taipei — form a standing beat for the portal. Taihai Net covers the forum city as its home event: announcements, agreements, and the grassroots encounters through which cross-strait integration is officially pursued.

Policy from Beijing, read in Xiamen

Cross-strait news is also national policy news, and the portal's aggregation function includes carrying that policy to the readers it affects. National measures to make Fujian a demonstration zone for integrated development across the Taiwan Strait — with Xiamen-Kinmen cooperation named as an exemplary project, and policies ensuring Taiwan compatriots equal treatment in employment, health, housing and social services, aiming to make Fujian the first-choice destination for Taiwan residents and enterprises developing on the mainland — are announced in Beijing but implemented, and felt, in Xiamen. Arrivals from Taiwan through Fujian entry ports are counted in the hundreds of thousands in a matter of months. Taihai Net's position in the Xiamen Daily group makes it a channel through which such policy reaches its local audience in usable form.

The Xiamen Daily group and the converged system

Taihai Net operates within the Xiamen Daily media group, the municipal media group of a vice-provincial city that holds provincial-level authority in economic administration. Like other Chinese newspaper groups, the Xiamen group has converged its print, web and mobile operations, and within that structure Taihai Net holds the specialist brief — Taiwan affairs — while sister platforms carry the group's general Xiamen news. Its operation follows the national framework for internet news information services licensed under the Cyberspace Administration of China. The arrangement is characteristic of Chinese media's division of labour: a flagship daily of record, and themed portals beneath it, each aggregating and originating for a defined audience. Taihai Net's audience just happens to live on two sides of a strait.

A shared Minnan culture

Beneath the politics, the portal's culture coverage rests on kinship. Xiamen is a Minnan city; its Hokkien language, its temples and festivals, its tea and its food are shared with Quanzhou and Zhangzhou — and with Taiwan, where Minnan emigrants from exactly this coast formed the majority population. Clan genealogies, Mazu devotion, and ancestral villages in Fujian draw Taiwan visitors in a steady stream of roots-seeking travel, and cross-strait forums include dedicated sessions on family lineage and shared surnames. For Taihai Net, culture is not a soft supplement to strait news; it is the human substrate of the relationship it covers, and a reason its readership extends into Taiwan's own communities.

Why Taihai Net matters

Taihai Net matters because there is no other beat quite like its home beat. From Xiamen — treaty port, special economic zone, ferry terminal for Kinmen, host of the Straits Forum — it reports the Taiwan Strait as what it is locally: a narrow, busy, family-crossed stretch of water as much as a geopolitical line. Its model, aggregating both sides' media, adding original commentary and practical service information, and rooting the whole in a municipal newspaper group, makes it one of the working instruments of cross-strait communication. Readers come to taihainet.com to find out what the other side is saying and what the rules now are. In the life of the strait, that is an essential service.