The true benefit of the cross-strait trade pact was the momentum it provided for Taiwan and East Asian economies to move toward regional integration, academics said at a symposium yesterday, but they advised Taiwan to “depoliticize” its relations to take the next step forward.
“Taiwan can play a more effective role in the process of Asia--Pacific integration by taking the path of depoliticization,” Daniel Rosen, an adjunct associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, said at the forum titled “Beyond ECFA: Taiwan and Regional Integration in the Asia-Pacific.”
The symposium, organized by Taiwan’s Institute for National Policy Research, aimed to define Taiwan’s future role following the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China in June to liberalize and institutionalize cross-strait trade ties.
Beijing’s readiness to stop impeding Taiwan’s links to other economies depends in part on Taiwan’s willingness to depoliticize the significance of those external links, Rosen said.
If the function of those links is to maximize Taiwan’s prosperity, then Taiwan would be advised to sidestep Beijing’s anxiety, he said.
Rosen also urged Taiwan to empower private enterprises and serve as a bridge in Asia between East and West, grasping opportunities to deepen economic relations across the Pacific and with Europe at the same time.
The academic expressed some concern regarding Taiwan’s future course mainly because of its -internal situation, which he said seemed to “get more politicized every year, and this is not good news.”
John Ravenhill, a political scientist at Australian National University, said that the ECFA would have at best a marginal impact on Taiwan’s aggregate welfare, but said it would be significant in other ways.
He believed the pact would affect the dynamics of negotiations on preferential trade agreements among the four large economies of Northeast Asia — China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
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