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No immediate free trade pact with China: Taiwan

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou hopes to forge closer commercial ties with rival China to help boost the island’s economy. Since taking office last May, he has moved aggressively to relax controls on trade and investment with the mainland.

Taiwan’s economics minister Yiin Chii-ming said the island must sign a free trade agreement with China or risk a further decline in exports as regional trade blocs become the global norm. Taiwan’s exports have fallen more than 40 percent year-on-year in the past two months.

On Tuesday, Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chairman Fu Dong-cheng told reporters the sides would work to set up Taiwanese bank and brokerage branches in China, but that the two countries would not establish a free trade pact in the first half of this year.

‘We will discuss the agreement with China only after the Taiwanese public has reached a consensus on the issue,’ Fu said.

The proposed agreement has come in for heavy criticism from the pro-independence opposition, which sees it as a possible precursor to unification. The government denies the agreement has any political component.

The issues will be formally agreed at the next round of bilateral talks in the first half of this year, Fu said. A date has not been set for the talks.

Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949. Beijing still claims the island as part of its territory and says it is intent on unification _ by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary.

Asked about Taiwanese criticism of the proposed agreement, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office insisted it was purely an economic arrangement that stood to benefit both sides.

‘What we say is, economics is economics, and there’s no need to do too much analysis from the political perspective,’ Fan Liqing said at a regularly scheduled news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.

Still, experts say China is expected to embrace any trade pact with the self-governed island because it sees closer economic ties with Taiwan as a step toward eventual political union.

Fu also said the two countries would cooperate to clamp down on crime, but did not provide specifics. Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chairman Liu Te-shun had said in February that they would exchange information to aid investigations.

The Mainland Affairs Council is a Cabinet-level agency in charge of implementing Taiwan’s China policy.