Sat, Sep 06, 2014 page3

• Trade progress depends on Taiwan: official

  • Staff writer, with CNA
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  China’s top negotiator with Taiwan said on Thursday that the “ball is in Taiwan’s court” regarding the signing of a bilateral trade-in-goods agreement.

  China’s Associations for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) Chairman Chen Deming (陳德銘) added that it could be “difficult” to finalize the pact before China and South Korea sign a free-trade agreement (FTA).

  Beijing’s FTA negotiations with Seoul are progressing smoothly and are 90 percent complete, he said after a meeting in China with his Taiwanese counterpart, Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Lin Join-sane (林中森).

  However, even if the negotiations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait could be completed before the FTA is signed, there would still be a long process before Taiwan could adopt the trade-in-goods pact, Chen said.

  China will try to “maintain proper equilibrium on all sides” in its negotiations with South Korea, he said.

  “But the China-South Korea FTA is likely to be completed sooner” than the trade-in-goods pact, he said.

  He added that there is no chance that the trade-in-goods pact would clear the legislature before a bill on monitoring cross-strait agreements is passed.

  “The ball is not in our court, but in Taiwan’s court,” Chen said.

  Lin, who is leading a delegation of foundation board members and supervisors on a visit to the cities of Ningbo and Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, said that the executive and legislative branches in Taiwan check and balance each other and there are varying opinions in a democratic society.

  A cross-strait service trade agreement signed last year remains stalled in the legislature after it spurred massive public protests earlier this year.

  In the wake of the student-led protests, the government agreed to process the bill on monitoring cross-strait pacts before the controversial service trade accord.

  Although the bill has stalled in the legislature, it has not affected ongoing consultations between the semi-official SEF and ARATS, Chen said.

  Taiwan and China are set to resume negotiations on Wednesday on the trade-in-goods pact after a 10-month interval.

  In other news, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said Taiwan and China reached a “concrete consensus” on clinical tests for new drugs.

  The apparent breakthrough came during a recent visit by Vice Minister of Health Shiu Ming-neng (許銘能) to China, where he met with related Chinese agencies for talks on cooperation in the research and development (R&D) of new drugs.

  Representatives from both sides reached a “consensus” on cooperation in the clinical tests of drugs, recognition of clinical data and data used for reference in drug inspection and registration, in a bid to simplify screening and approval procedures and to avoid duplicating tests, MAC Deputy Minister Wu Mei-hung (吳美紅) said.

  She said that Taiwan and China also exchanged views on the prevention and control of the Ebola virus, but did not talk about R&D for an Ebola vaccine.

  China has shown keen interest in Taiwan’s advanced medical management and services, hoping to upgrade the quality of its medical care through exchanges, she said.

  Since the two sides signed an agreement on medical and health cooperation three years ago, they have achieved “concrete results” together in the prevention and treatment of communicable diseases and notifications of epidemics, she said.
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