The EU's experiences with regional integration hold lessons for Taiwan and China, not as a finished product, but as an ongoing process, according to the Mainland Affairs Council's new vice chairman, David Huang (黃偉峰).
Huang spoke with reporters yesterday in his capacity as vice chairman for the first time yesterday, explaining the challenges involved in implementing the EU's integration model in East Asia as a possible solution to the cross-strait political stalemate.
Huang, who previously worked at the Academia Sinica's European and American Studies Institute, has been hailed by council officials as an expert on European political structures and procedures and is expected to take on some of the responsibility for relaying the government's stance on cross-strait relations to visiting US and European officials.
Huang will oversee the work of the council's department of educational and cultural affairs, as well as its policy planning department.
"European integration is a process, and the results of that process are unknown. It is a trade-off, but the process is better than an approach that begins with a specific end determined beforehand," Huang said.
"In a democratic society, you can't know for sure what the finished product will look like, because it rests in the hands of the constituency. You can't promise a particular end," he said.
According to Huang, cross-strait relations could benefit from the EU model despite the difficulties involved, saying the application of the EU model in Taiwan was an option that was gradually "maturing."
Huang echoed the president's Double Ten National Day speech by saying political differences should be put aside to enable economic cooperation.
"First economic concerns, then the political. This is the same as the call for negotiations on practical, concrete issues. It is pushing politics aside," Huang said.
Council Vice Chairman Chiu Tai-san (邱太三), who is also the council's spokesman, yesterday reiterated the council's stance on the possibility of negotiations with China on charter flights over the Lunar New Year.
"We think that there is still a chance that China will agree to negotiate over cross-strait charter flights for the holidays ... From previous experience, we feel that China has left the question open," Chiu said.
Chiu said that, although China's Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) had called the chartered flights domestic routes last Thursday in response to the president's Double Ten National Day speech, the matter had yet to be decided.
He said that China was probably unwilling to make any concessions before Taiwan's year-end legislative elections.
Chiu referred to the charter flights as cross-strait routes, avoiding the more controversial alternatives of designating the flight paths as either domestic or international routes.
While Huang pointed to the large amount of distortion brought about by the cross-strait "signaling game" that relied on the indirect relaying of dialogue through the media, he described himself as an optimist, saying that the council has begun to train personnel in anticipation of future opportunities for conducting negotiations with China.
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