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Beijing officials to pay their last respects to Koo

Two senior officials from the Beijing-based Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) will travel to Taipei tomorrow to pay their respects to Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), the late Taiwanese negotiator with China, a Chinese official said yesterday.

Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), director of the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) of China's State Council, said his deputy, Sun Yafu (孫亞夫), who is also the ARATS vice chairman, as well as ARATS Secretary-General Li Yafei (李亞飛), will pay tribute to the late chairman Koo, formerly of the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), on behalf of ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan (汪道涵).

Chen said the trip is not only aimed at expressing China's esteem for Koo's contributions to the promotion of cross-strait relations but also at symbolizing Beijing's respect for the people of Taiwan.

"We hope Sun and Li will convey our remembrance and condolences during their trip to Taipei," Chen said.

Koo, a respected businessman known for his diplomatic frankness, held a groundbreaking meeting with Wang in Singapore in 1993 in the first formal cross-strait contact in more than four decades. He died on Jan. 3 at the age of 88.

The historical Koo-Wang meeting laid the framework for the quasi-official SEF and ARATS to handle cross-strait exchanges in the absence of official ties. In 1998, the two envoys met again when Koo traveled to Shanghai and Beijing to boost further rapprochement.

However, Beijing unilaterally suspended regular SEF-ARATS dialogue in July 1999, when former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) defined cross-strait ties as a state-to-state relationship.

Wang sent his condolences to Koo's family immediately after learning of his death by issuing a press statement through Beijing's official Xinhua news agency.
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