A broad trade pact between Taiwan and China could be set back as legislators review and possibly overrule it, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said yesterday.
Taiwan’s polarized legislature could ask the government to change an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China, which is expected to take the form of a free-trade-style deal that would lower tariffs in hundreds of sectors, Wang said.
The government has said it hopes to sign the agreement at a formal meeting with Beijing officials early this year. The deal is expected to open trade links between Taiwan and other Asian economies.
PHOTO: STEVE CHAN, REUTERS
“We can’t change the content of [an] ECFA, but we can overrule it or support it,” Wang said in an interview.
If the legislature overrules the pact, he said, legislators would ask the government to redo parts of the deal.
Some in Taiwan fear the pact would allow an unwelcome flood of Chinese goods into Taiwan’s economy. Their opposition could pressure legislators to take action.
“After it’s signed, does it affect the country’s sovereignty, and secondly is there anything that harms national security?” Wang said. “And will it create any impact on people’s rights and interests? We will evaluate it according to these criteria.”
The legislature hopes to spend more than a legal limit of one month to deliberate the deal after the two sides initially sign it, he said.
“If Taiwan doesn’t sign an ECFA with China this year, our competitiveness of course will be weakened, but that doesn’t go as far as saying we won’t survive,” Wang said.
Taiwan has floated to China a confidential list of 700 to 1,000 items for tariff revisions under an ECFA, subject to negotiations, analysts said.
Reports say Taiwanese officials have sought aggressive tariff cuts for textiles, machinery and petrochemical products.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS