PFP group plans to attend Wang Daohan's funeral

Cross-strait delegation * The funeral for Wang Daohan, chairman of China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, will be held on Friday * The PFP will send several party members to the service, but is consulting Wang's family on whether Chairman James Soong will lead the delegation * Key Beijing leaders are also expected to attend.

The People First Party (PFP) will organize a group to visit Shanghai to pay the party's last respects to Wang Daohan (汪道涵), China's top cross-strait negotiator, who died on Saturday at the age of 90, a PFP official said yesterday.

Party Spokesman Hsieh Kung-ping (謝公秉) said that it is still unclear whether PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) will lead the PFP delegation to Wang's funeral, scheduled to be held at a funeral parlor in Shanghai on Friday.

The decision on Soong's attendance will be made after consultations with Wang's family, Hsieh said.

Soong met with Wang at his Shanghai residence during a visit to China in May.

Members of the PFP delegation will also include several PFP legislators, Hsieh added.

Key figures of the Beijing leadership are expected to travel to Shanghai to attend the funeral for Wang, the late chairman of Beijing's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), a quasi-official intermediary body responsible for negotiating with Taiwan in the absence of formal ties between the two sides.

ARATS's Taiwanese counterpart is the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF).

Both SEF Chairman Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄), a legislator from the Democratic Progressive Party, and Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), have offered to visit Shanghai to pay their last respects to Wang Daohan, a senior Communist Party of China member who had been Shanghai mayor in the 1980s.

Chang's predecessor, Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), who died in January, held ground-breaking talks with Wang Daohan in 1993 in Singapore, signing four agreements on cross-strait technical affairs and establishing an institutionalized channel of consultations between the two sides.

However, Beijing suspended the dialogue in 1995, to protest against then-president Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) visit to the US, and later in 1999 against Lee's remarks which defined cross-strait relations as those between two states.

Beijing has refused to resume dialogue with Taipei in the past five years since the pro-independence DPP came to power.