 |
|
|
|
|
Ma picks ex-economic official to be chief negotiator with China
|
|
|
Tue, Apr 15, 2008
The Straits Times
|
|
|
|
|
|
TAIWAN - TAIWAN'S President-elect Ma Ying-jeou has named a veteran economic planner as top envoy for negotiations with China.
His announcement came amid high hopes for a resumption in cross-strait dialogue following a historic meeting between his deputy and Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Mr Ma's choice is 75-year-old Chiang Pin-kung, who will head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), a semi-official group which handles exchanges with China.
'SEF will be responsible for handling cross-strait relations, with the authorisation of the Mainland Affairs Council,' said Mr Ma, referring to Taiwan's top China policy decision-making body.
| Mr Ma, who will take office on May 20, said yesterday: 'We will push for the reopening of cross-strait negotiations after May 20.'
'Thanks to the Boao meeting, some of the barriers for the resumption of talks have been removed,' he added, referring to a meeting between President Hu and Taiwan's incoming vice-president, Mr Vincent Siew, on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan at the weekend.
Although Taiwan's Vice-President-elect attended the forum in his capacity as chairman of the private Cross-Straits Common Market Foundation, the meeting was the highest-level contact between both sides since 1949.
Mr Siew said yesterday that it was too early to comment on a timetable, but that both sides wanted to start talks as soon as possible.
Mr Ma said the Hu-Siew meeting had been a good start in breaking the ice between the two sides, but cautioned that progress would be slow.
'We have melted only a small chunk of the iceberg,' he said. 'There is still a long way to go, and we will move forward at a stable pace, never in haste. But we will not go backwards.'
Mr Chiang was a top economic official under former president Lee Teng-hui, who left office in 2000. It was during Mr Lee's tenure that talks with China broke down in 1999.
Six years earlier in Singapore, then SEF chairman, the late Koo Chen-fu, held talks with Mr Wang Daohan, who was then chairman of China's semi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait.
The talks took place under the so-called '1992 consensus', under which both sides agreed there was only one China, although each side could have a different interpretation of what that meant.
Mr Wang and Mr Koo met again for talks in Shanghai in 1998. But Beijing broke off the talks the following year after Mr Lee defined ties as 'special state-to-state' relations.
Cross-strait ties worsened after Taiwan's independence-leaning Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party became president in 2000. Mr Chen was re-elected in 2004.
Mr Ma, whose presidential victory brought the Kuomintang back to power, said he had no plans to visit either China or Hong Kong, but insisted that significant progress on trade and other issues could still be made with the mainland.
At the Hu-Siew meeting on Saturday, the Chinese leader endorsed two of Mr Ma's key election promises: opening up Taiwan to more Chinese tourists and allowing weekend charter flights. Direct air travel across the Taiwan Strait has been banned since both sides split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
A survey conducted on Sunday by the Taipei-based China Times showed that a record 39.4per cent of people consider cross-strait relations to be friendly. The previous record of 32.2per cent was posted in 1993 after the first top-level dialogue in Singapore.
The Boao meeting, reported Bloomberg, also spurred an index of construction stocks on the benchmark Taiex index to climb 4.1per cent to its highest in almost 10 years yesterday, while the Taiex Tourist index jumped 5.4 per cent to a record.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
| 
