The organization and leadership of a proposed cross-strait economic cooperation committee are expected to be determined within two days, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Sheng-chung (林聖忠) said on Sunday.
The committee to be established under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) that Taipei and Beijing signed in June will serve as a platform to facilitate negotiations on arrangements for the ECFA and their implementation.
Taiwan and China have still to come to terms on the organization and leadership of the committee, which, according to the terms of the ECFA, will operate under the framework of the already existing Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) on the Taipei side and the Beijing-based Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS). It will be solely responsible for post-ECFA negotiations on technical issues.
Lin said he would depart for China on Thursday, along with SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤), mainly to visit the Shanghai Expo and to meet with Taiwanese businesspeople operating in the Kunshan City area for talks.
On whether he and Chiang would meet Chinese officials for talks on the committee’s establishment and the signing of a cross-strait investment guarantee agreement during the upcoming visit, Lin said that was still uncertain.
“It is up to the Mainland Affairs Council [MAC] to decide,” Lin said.
On the leadership of the proposed committee, he said it would be “reasonable” if Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Francis Liang (梁國新) were designated to lead the Taiwan liaison officers on the formation of the committee, while the Chinese side could be led by Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Jiang Zengwei (姜增偉).
Liang and Jiang led the two sides respectively at cross-strait talks in Chongqing prior to the June 29 signing of the ECFA.
Ministry of Economic Affairs sources have also speculated that Liang and Jiang could be the top liaison officers for the two sides on the committee.
Meanwhile, Chiang is scheduled to meet ARATS Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) in Shanghai on Saturday, marking the first high-level meeting since the ECFA formally took effect on Sunday.
The committee is expected to meet first on sub-agreements under the ECFA — on merchandise, services and investment and trade dispute resolution — he said.
As a post-ECFA opinion and information-exchanging platform, the committee will have no fixed personnel and the two sides will assign different officials for different rounds of talks based on their expertise in the issues at hand, the MAC said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,