China has notified Taiwan that the latest round of negotiations on trade in goods scheduled to take place this month have been pushed back, government officials said yesterday, denying that the stalled ratification of the cross-strait service trade agreement was the reason for the postponement.
Minister of Economic Affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) confirmed to lawmakers that China unilaterally decided to postpone the negotiation for the reason that “it was inadequately prepared for the talks.”
The working-level technical meeting was originally set to be held this month, until China recently requested more time to deliberate what had been discussed in previous rounds of negotiations, Chang said.
It was the first time that both sides needed to reschedule a meeting for the negotiations, but this was not tantamount to a suspension of the talks, Chang said when fielding questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) at a meeting of the Economics Committee at the legislature.
Lai raised the issue following a report in the Chinese-language Commercial Times on Tuesday that the negotiation meeting scheduled for late last month had been canceled by Taipei.
The report quoted anonymous sources as saying that the situation was the political fallout from the student-led Sunflower movement stalling the cross-strait service trade agreement in the legislature and sowing uncertainty over future cross-strait negotiations by demanding the establishment of an oversight mechanism for dealing with cross-strait issues.
Chang dismissed the concerns, saying that he would only consider it unusual if China demands to postpone the negotiation over and over again.
“I think it’s normal if a meeting is rescheduled half a month or a month later,” he said.
Pressed by Lai on whether the stalling of the cross-strait service trade agreement has effectively dragged down the negotiations on trade in goods, Chang said he could in no way judge the situation.
“The mainland [Chinese] side has never said so,” he said.
Chang said he is not sure if the negotiations on trade in goods can be concluded by the end of this year, as both sides had originally hoped.
He added that no concessions had been made by China during previous negotiations regarding Taiwan’s high-priority issues, which include tariff reductions and import quotas on machine tools, petrochemical products, panels and vehicles.
Separately, at a meeting of the Internal Administration Committee, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) held similar views on the trade issue.
Beijing had not demanded that the negotiations on trade in goods be stopped, Wang said.
Wang reiterated his position that any single change made to the cross-strait service trade agreement by lawmakers during the deliberation could render the deal invalid.
“There’s a very high likelihood that the other party [China] would not agree to reopen negotiations [on the specific articles affected],” he said.
It would be better if lawmakers understood the consequences before they decided to table any motion to revise the agreement, Wang said.
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