The Economic Cooperation Committee (ECC) that has been planned with China is expected to be formed soon, with a vice minister from each side of the Taiwan Strait acting as co-convener, officials said yesterday.
The officials, who asked not to be named, said the announcement would be made at the meeting between the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and the -Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), which will be held in Taipei from today until Wednesday.
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Francis Liang (梁國新) and Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Jiang Zengwei (姜增偉) are expected to be joint heads of the committee.
It will be formed in accordance with the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) that was signed by the heads of the SEF and ARATS in Chongqing, China, in June.
The cross-strait ECC will be comprised of seven panels that will deal with commodities trade, service trade, financial services, intellectual property rights, economic cooperation, dispute settlement and investment, the officials said.
The panels will be headed by government bureau or department executives. For example, the commodity trade panel will be headed by Bureau of Foreign Trade Director-General Bill Cho (卓士昭), while the intellectual property rights panel will be led by Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Intellectual Property Office -director-general Wang Mei-hua (王美花).
The heads of the panels will be called “conveners,” while the ECC leaders will act as “general conveners” under the SEF-ARATS framework, the officials said.
The deputy heads of the SEF and ARATS will be named chairpersons of the ECC, the officials said.
Also, ECC panels are expected to do the follow-up work on commodity trade, services trade, dispute settlement and investment protection, which means the two sides would want the committee to be in place before the end of this year.
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:
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