Taipei  - Taiwan may allow a former Taiwan military officer who defected to China in 1979 and is now a World Bank senior vice president to visit Taiwan, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Commons Daily, quoting an unnamed source, said Taiwan plans to allow Justin Lin Yifu to visit Taiwan by inviting him to attend the World Games, held in Kaohsiung July 16-26.

The invitation will be issued to Lin by Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu, who is a distant relative of Lin, the report said.

Chen, on her visit to the United States to promote the World Games in February, dined with Lin in Washington DC near the headquarters of the World Bank, the paper said.

Chen flew to China Thursday to promote the World Games. She received a warm welcome from the Chinese side and met with the Beijing mayor and Shanghai mayor.

Lin defected to China in 1979 while serving in the army on Kinmen, a Taiwan-held islet off China's Fujian coast, swimming across the water using five basketballs as flotation.

He left behind his wife and a child who were later reunited with him when he went to study in the United States.

Lauding him as a hero, China allowed Lin to study economics at Beijing University and sent him to study economics at the University of Chicago.

He soon rose to become a top economic strategist in China, founded the Centre for Economic Research at Beijing University, and contributed to China's economic reform.

In 2008, Lin was named the World Bank's chief economist and senior vice president for development economics, becoming the first Chinese and first Southeast Asian to hold the post.

In recent years, as China-Taiwan ties improved, Lin has expressed the wish several times to visit his ancestral home in Taiwan and to pay homage to his deceased parents, but Taiwan said he would be court-martialed for defecting to China.

The highest penalty for defecting to the enemy's side from a front-line battlefield is the death.

Taiwan's Defence Ministry has said several times that although the 30-year statute of limitation has passed for Lin, Lin still would still be court-martialled because he committed treason and his crime had very bad influence on the Taiwan public. (dpa)