A senior Chinese official said that China will continue to honor its agreements with Taiwan, but ruled out any new accords unless Beijing’s conditions are met.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) arrived in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday for a meeting with the heads of nine Taiwanese business associations in Zhejiang Province.
At the meeting, Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland executive vice president Hsieh Chih-tung (謝智通) told Zhang about the difficulties facing Taiwanese businesses that specialize in machinery, equipment and other fields, and expressed concern that China would reduce its preferential policies for Taiwanese businesses.
Zhang said that although talks between Taipei and Beijing have been suspended since January, Taiwanese businesses need not worry, because China will keep its promises and continue to honor the 23 agreements that the two sides have signed since 2008, according to people who attended the meeting.
The agreements were negotiated over 11 rounds of talks between the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS). They are the semi-official organizations charged with the conduct of cross-strait relations in the absence of official ties.
However, regarding follow-up agreements according to the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement of 2010, Zhang was quoted as saying that “it is impossible for the doors to be open without the [so-called] ‘1992 consensus’ as a foundation.”
Talks between the SEF and ARATS have stopped because without a common political foundation based on the “1992 consensus,” China is uncertain whether it is negotiating with “a foreign country,” he said.
If Taiwan does not recognize the “1992 consensus,” official communication channels cannot be resumed even through another channel, Zhang added.
As a precondition for continued development in cross-strait ties, Beijing has insisted that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government accept the “1992 consensus,” which refers to a supposed understanding reached during the cross-strait talks in 1992 that both Taiwan and China acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what that means.
The DPP rejects the existence of the “1992 consensus.”
Former KMT lawmaker Su Chi (蘇起) in 2006 said that he had made up the term in 2000, when he was head of the Mainland Affairs Council, before the KMT handed power to the DPP.
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