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Trade workshop targets cross-strait issues

The First Workshop on Trade Across the Taiwan Strait kicked off Tuesday in Taipei for three days of brainstorming and speeches on issues pertaining to the new trade climate and challenges that Taiwan and China are facing.

In his address to the opening session, Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), former premier under the KMT and current chairman of the Cross Strait Common Market Foundation, which is sponsoring the workshop, said Taiwan is now facing new challenges of various types amid the changing political and economic situations in the world.

China is now Taiwan's biggest rival as well as its greatest challenge in terms of trade and business, and Taiwan can neither shun nor pretend not to see it, Siew said.

With the accession of both Taiwan and China to the WTO at the beginning of this year, further integration of the trade regimes across the Strait has become an irreversible trend, he said.

Noting that there are still numerous obstacles and barriers to increasing cross-strait trade, Siew said the Cross Strait Common Market Foundation is committed to helping bolster the constructive development of cross-strait trade and business -- through the principles of reciprocity, exchange, peace and co-prosperity.

Siew noted that both sides should make the most of the opportunities that WTO membership brings -- to prosper and at the same time normalize trade and business relations across the Taiwan Strait.

He added that Taiwan and China can then talk about the formation of a free-trade agreement which would eventually pave the way for the two sides to establish a cross-strait common market.

Scheduled speakers at the three-day workshop include Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Chen Ruey-long (陳瑞隆); Yen Wan-chin (顏萬進), deputy secretary-general of the quasi-official intermediary Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF); Jan Jyh-horng (詹志宏), director of the Research and Planning Department under the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), who also doubles as a SEF deputy secretary-general; and Fu Don-cheng (傅棟成), director of the MAC's Department of Economic Affairs.
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