With chances for a free trade agreement (FTA) with the US any time soon appearing more and more remote, Taiwan may have to shift its energies toward working on individual trade agreements covering specific areas, officials of the Taiwan American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) said in Washington this week.
An AmCham delegation is in the US to discuss its latest "white paper" on Taiwan's economy and bilateral trade issues with US government officials, congressmen, think tanks and business groups.
In a press conference dominated by prospects for an FTA, AmCham president Tom Johnson and executive director Richard Vuylsteke noted that a key US trade law that has enabled Washington to sign several FTAs in recent years is due to expire next June.
The law, commonly known as "fast track authority," allows the administration to negotiate FTAs subject only to an up-or-down vote in Congress, preventing the lawmakers from amending any agreement to death as they did regularly before the law was enacted.
The AmCham officials conceded that there is hardly any chance that Taiwan can go through all of the difficult steps needed to nail down an FTA in the next 12 months.
Nevertheless, they said, Taiwan should continue to work on an FTA, since any accomplishments could be helpful when it wants to negotiate other trade pacts with the US later.
The FTA "is a useful tool to keep people focused," Vuylsteke said.
However, Johnson warned against focusing strictly on an FTA.
"We want to back away from a focus on FTA," Johnson said. "If the content of an FTA is really economic, if it's a series of bilateral agreements of other agreements, it still accomplishes the same goal," Johnson said.
"So I don't want the label to get in the way of the content," he said.
"If fast track runs out [without an FTA], it's still not wasted effort," because the trade disputes between Washington and Taipei still have to be resolved, Vuylsteke said.
The US business world has so far failed to weigh in in favor of an FTA, and the US Trade Representative (USTR) office has made it clear that it will not consider an FTA unless US businessmen push for it.
However, Taiwan understands that "this is about the economic package, and that it has to be put together so that the [US] business organizations can come in and say, `This is good,'" Vuylsteke said.
Looking at the bright side, the AmCham executives said that in the past six months, Taiwan has begun to recognize this. Johnson said that this change was the most important recent development in terms of Taiwan's official attitude toward the FTA, contrasting it with earlier times when the Taiwanese government emphasized the political and diplomatic aspects of an FTA.
This has apparently been received favorably by the USTR.
"The USTR made it very clear that these are not issues of sovereignty," Vuylsteke said. "It comes down to if Taiwan can show that this is economically beneficial between the US and Taiwan, and if it is economically beneficial to China. Then, it is a very strong case that might convince China not to oppose a US-Taiwan FTA as it had done in the past," Vuylsteke said.
The AmCham officials also stressed the need for direct cross-strait links to any FTA.
"We think that cross-strait links are essential for an FTA because without it, it skews the weight of the scales with American companies," Vuylsteke said.
"US companies see Taiwan as a gateway to China, so to get US business enthusiasm, the links with China are essential," he said.
However, Johnson said that direct cross-strait links are not a "precondition, but a very smart first move."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater