Taipei, Feb. 8 (CNA) The upcoming Year of the Tiger will present both challenges and opportunities for negotiations on a proposed cross-Taiwan Strait trade pact that Taiwan hopes to ink with the consensus of the public, Taiwan's top China affairs negotiators said Monday. Speaking at a year-end press conference, Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Chiang Ping-kung said the priority for the coming year will be signing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China on the basis of consensus among the Taiwanese public.
In terms of cross-strait relations, the coming year will be more challenging than previous years because of ECFA, while at the same time presenting more opportunities than ever before, he said. "The ECFA will be the core of cross-strait exchanges in the new year, " he went on.
While both sides concluded their first round of talks in late January and a substantial part of the agreement has yet to be discussed at all, Taiwan still intends to sign the agreement as soon as possible, preferably before the Legislative Yuan's June recess, so that the agreement can take effect in 2011, Chiang said.
As the ECFA support rate plummeted from 70 percent in April last year to 50.9 percent in an Executive Yuan survey in early January, the administrative branch knows it must do a better job of convincing the general public, as well as the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), as to why the deal is important for Taiwan's economy, he added.
Waving goodbye to the Year of the Ox, the government has vowed to be transparent during the negotiations process, to notify the legislative branch about progress of the negotiations and to put the agreement under legislative review. It has also promised to improve its communication with the public on the ECFA, which many fear would cause an influx of Chinese products and job losses.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) , Taiwan's top China policy-making authority, said the ECFA negotiation team is scheduled to brief the Legislative Yuan 10 times from February to June. The MAC also plans to step up its communication on ECFA with three groups -- residents in central and southern Taiwan, those from low- and middle-income households and owners of small- and medium-sized businesses -- in which ECFA support is particularly low.
Chiang acknowledged that both sides are present in a "World Trade Organization (WTO) -minus" status, as Taiwan has banned 830 Chinese agricultural products and about 1,300 industrial products from being imported while China has demanded "normalization of cross-strait trade relations, " but he said Taiwan and China should work the issue out together.
While the WTO norms are important, so is the special relationship between Taiwan and China, Chiang said, adding that both sides should negotiate on the basis of that special relationship.
President Ma Ying-jeou has pledged that the ban on Chinese agricultural imports will not be lifted, but the opposition has questioned the promise, saying that under WTO regulations, Taiwan will in that case have to make concessions in other areas.
According to Chiang, Taiwan is determined to boost its exchanges with China but will uphold the interests of Taiwan people's every step of the way.
He also said U.S. arms sale to Taiwan will not threaten the future of bilateral exchanges with China. "The U.S. arms sales to Taiwan... are nothing new to us. They will not have any negative impact on Taiwan's future negotiations and exchanges with China, " Chiang said in response to a reporter's question.