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Ma expects end to
cross-strait deadlock
POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS: The president said the
meeting scheduled for February between officials from Taiwan and China should be
able to resolve some sticking points
By Mo Yan-chih / Staff reporter
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that plans for the first official
meeting between the heads of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and the Taiwan
Affairs Office (TAO) next year was a positive development for cross-strait
relations and could see the two sides break a negotiations deadlock.
MAC Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) and TAO Director Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) are to meet
in an official capacity after the Lunar New Year holidays in February. They
first met in October, when they sat in on talks between former vice president
Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of
the APEC summit in Indonesia.
“The government has been calling on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait not to
deny each other’s authority to govern [Taiwan], while not recognizing each
other’s sovereignty. It’s a positive development for the officials handling
cross-strait affairs to meet with each other,” Ma, who doubles as Chinese
Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, said while presiding over a meeting of the
KMT’s Central Standing Committee.
As negotiations on the establishment of representative offices on each side have
reached a stalemate on issues such as visitation rights for Taiwanese detained
in China, the meeting between Wang and Zhang should seek to establish
consensuses on the sticking points and further promote cross-strait exchanges,
Ma said.
“If the two sides cannot resolve smaller issues, it will be difficult to make
breakthroughs on more serious political matters. The face-to-face communication
between the two officials should help resolve these things, and we should react
normally to such meetings,” Ma said.
During a report presented yesterday on cross-strait relations following the
Chinese Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, Wang said that he would unveil
the details of his meeting with Zhang soon.
The Wang-Zhang meeting is to be held in China before the next round of regular
meetings between the Straits Exchange Foundation and its Chinese counterpart,
the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, Wang said.
In the report, Wang said that China has been pressing Taiwan through various
cross-strait forums to hold political talks and said China could use its
declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over an area of the
East China Sea to promote the establishment of military confidence-building
measures between the two sides.
The government stresses the importance of the 1992 consensus as the foundation
for cross-strait relations, for handling sovereignty issues and to deepen
economic and cultural exchanges, he said.
Ma said that Taiwan will not avoid cross-strait political issues, adding that
the time was not right for political talks with China.
He said the signing of bilateral agreements and the proposed establishment of
cross-strait representative offices carried some political significance.
“It depends on whether there are urgent issues to be discussed. For example,
we’ve called on China to engage in dialogue with concerned parties regarding its
ADIZ and we won’t exclude the possibility of including the issue in cross-strait
negotiations,” he said.
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