Normalization of exchanges to begin

Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced at a meeting yesterday that the agency plans to move toward "normalizing" professional exchanges between Taiwan and China, a MAC spokesman said.

The spokesman, deputy director of the MAC's department of legal affairs, Jeff Yang (楊家駿), said that Tsai made the announcement during a regular monthly consultation meeting with cross-strait scholars, officials and former officials of the MAC and the Straits Exchange Foundation.

Normalization, in the context of professional exchanges, said Yang, would involve "treating Chinese professionals in the same way as professionals from other countries, although the MAC will reserve certain necessary rights vis a vis national security."

He said that it was possible that the MAC would remove the requirement that Chinese professionals obtain Taipei's approval one month in advance of visits to Taiwan and that it may extend the range of fields in which Chinese professionals can visit Taiwan.

Exchanges of personnel are currently only allowed in such fields as technology, medicine, mass communications and agriculture.

Yang said that the MAC would soon ease regulations on civil exchanges between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait after 14 years of strict control.

Between 1988, when the government first allowed civil exchanges between Taiwan and China, and the end of February this year, more than 23 million Taiwanese had visited China, while 720,000 Chinese nationals had visited Taiwan.

While there was a consensus among attending experts yesterday to ease the regulations, Yang added that they warned against the problem of "unbalanced" exchanges of information when Chinese nationals visit Taiwan.

Yang said that Taiwanese professionals provide much information to their Chinese counterparts about Taiwanese society, while getting little knowledge of Chinese society in return.

"Unilateral communications are not what exchanges are all about," he said.