No “black-box” operations were involved in negotiations over the cross-strait service trade agreement, a Taiwanese official told foreign officials on Wednesday during a briefing on the controversial pact.
The negotiations for the service trade agreement, as well as those for economic cooperation agreements with New Zealand and Singapore, were conducted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister Lin Chu-chia (林祖嘉) said at the briefing.
They were all conducted according to standard operating procedures, including consultations with industry and reports to lawmakers, Lin said in response to questions on the difference between the trade pact with New Zealand and the agreement with China.
Lin made the remarks during one of the two briefings organized by the ministry for foreign representatives and ambassadors based in Taipei to help them learn more about the government’s stance on the agreement and Taiwan’s free economic pilot zones.
The economic cooperation agreement with New Zealand was signed one month after the service agreement with China was inked in June last year, Lin said.
There have been no complaints on the transparency of the New Zealand agreement, but some people have described the government’s handling of the agreement with China as a black-box operation carried out in secret, he added.
It had nothing to do with black-box operations, Lin said, ascribing the accusations to “China factors.”
“I think that’s the key difference,” he said.
Opponents of the pact are worried that it will hurt Taiwan’s interests and open the way for greater Chinese influence over the country. Those concerns triggered a 24-day occupation of the legislature by protesters that ended on April 10.
China is said to be seeking to expand its economic influence over the nation in order to achieve eventual unification.
Saint Kitts and Nevis’ Ambassador to Taiwan Jasmine Elise Huggins asked about the possibility of renegotiating a particular article, instead of withdrawing the entire pact.
In response, Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said that this is a possibility, but that it would be “very difficult to isolate one single article” because the articles in the agreement are not independent from each other.
It is also difficult to know whether China would agree to such a move, Sun said.
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