Sat, Jun 07, 2008 page3

• Chen downbeat on cross-strait plans

  • By Jenny W. Hsu / STAFF REPORTER
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  Taiwan has already lost out to China even before it enters into formal negotiations with Beijing next week, said former Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) chairman Chen Ming-tong (陳明通) yesterday, expressing his pessimism about the KMT administration’s strategy on cross-strait issues.

  “Frankly, it is heartbreaking to see what the new administration has done to what we [the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government] had so painstakingly established in the last eight years,” he said in a meeting with the press.

  Chen, a major figure in the talks on direct-charter flights during the DPP era, said after extensive negotiations with Beijing, his team had successfully clinched direct cargo flights but the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) surrendered these soon after the party took power this March.

  

  Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung, center, receives a bottle of Taiwanese soil from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming at the DPP legislators’ meeting yesterday after Chiang spoke about cross-strait relations with legislators.

  PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES

  “Direct cargo flights benefit Taiwan more than they benefit China and that’s why Beijing was very reluctant about agreeing to them. But we insisted very strongly that all three [direct passenger and cargo flights and opening Taiwan for Chinese tourists] must be bound together,” Chen said, letting out a sigh.

  “It is like someone giving you a piece of candy that has one-third of it missing and the missing part is the chocolate cover, the best part of the candy,” he said.

  The quasi-official Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), however, is slated to meet with its Chinese counterpart, the Association on Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), in Beijing to sign a deal on only two issues — commencing direct weekend passenger-flights and allowing Chinese tourists to come to Taiwan by next month.

  “Now the KMT has abandoned the cargo flights. What will Taiwan do next to get them back?” he asked rhetorically, saying the KMT had dug their own grave because “it was the KMT that trashed all the existing communication channels when it took office.”

  “Since the KMT was the one that wanted to start the negotiation process from scratch with a brand new team of negotiators, the Chinese are not obliged to continue to honor the commitments it made in the previous negotiations,” he said.

  MAC Deputy Chairman Fu Tung-cheng (傅棟成), however, argued that the government had not “lost” cargo flight as accused, but rather cargo flights have been temporarily halted because of recent fuel hikes.

  Chen said this was nonsense and that if increased oil prices were the cause of the suspension of cargo flights, then passenger flights should be suspended as well.

  Chen said the next thing to watch is the content of the joint declaration that SEF and ARATS are expected to sign next week.

  Chen, who has returned to his teaching post at National Taiwan University, predicted Beijing would manipulate the content of the declaration by including the agreement signed in 2005 between then KMT chairman Lian Chan (連戰) and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in his capacity as the Chinese Communist Party leader.

  Among the five-point “vision for cross-strait peace” agreement inked between Lien and Hu, both parties oppose Taiwanese independence.
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