China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) Chairman Chen Deming (陳德銘) on Sunday said that there will be a problem for Beijing to unilaterally open the Chinese market to Taiwan since both are members of the WTO.
However, the problem can be dismissed if both Taiwan and China are “in one country,” he said.
Chen was responding a comment from Taiwanese businesspeople during a panel discussion at the four-day Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan Province that ended on Sunday.
The Cross-Strait Round Table of Entrepreneurs was attended by a 19-member Taiwanese delegation led by former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and by 19 Chinese officials and entrepreneurs.
During the round-table meeting, Taiwanese entrepreneurs said that they hoped China would open its market wider to them and continue to boost trade and economic cooperation and interactions with Taiwan without being influenced by political factors.
Chen replied that China has a dilemma.
“We are two WTO members in one country, which have not yet been unified peacefully,” Chen said.
Under WTO rules, if one WTO member offers a preferential treatment to another member, it has to give that same treatment to all other members, he said.
China will face economic challenges if it unilaterally opens its market to Taiwan, “but this problem will be much easier to solve if the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are in one country,” he said.
Cross-strait relations has cooled since Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in May last year, mainly due to her refusal to heed Beijing’s calls to recognize the so-called “1992 consensus” as the sole political foundation for cross-strait exchanges.
The “1992 consensus” — a term former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) said in 2006 that he had made up in 2000 — refers to a tacit understanding between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party that both sides acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
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