Orders worth about US$2 billion for high-tech products and farm produce. Offers of tax incentives for investment. A promise to send 120,000 tourists to Taiwan every year.
Those were some of the deals signed off by a 2,000-strong delegation from China’s Fujian Province during a recent weeklong visit to Taiwan.
It was one of the many buy-Taiwan delegations China has sent over the past year. The visits underscore China’s newly acquired wealth and its immense buying power. They come amid President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) efforts to promote trade and end decades of cross-strait hostility.
The Fujian delegation, led by the governor and three deputy governors, was by far the largest and attracted constant media coverage, with television cameras following Fujian chief Huang Xiaojing (黃小晶) as he chatted with people on the street, visited high-tech factories and sampled Taiwan’s famed yellow mangoes.
While it is still uncertain whether all of the product orders will be honored — previous Chinese buying trips to Taiwan have not always lived up to their promises — the mission from Fujian underscores China’s interest in leveraging its buying power to achieve political ends.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) believes that closer economic ties are the best way to move toward that target, and provincial buying trips — combined with a groundbreaking trade pact expected to be signed next month — are viewed as key elements in his strategy.
Huang attended a ceremony in Kaohsiung City for the inaugural cruise by China’s Cosco Star from the Fujian city of Xiamen that carried 300 Chinese passengers, many with the kind of bulging wallets that light up the eyes of Taiwanese merchants and tour operators.
Huang also offered tax incentives for Taiwanese investing in his province’s Haixi Economic Zone, which is modeled after Taiwan’s world-famous high-tech parks.
Working together, he said, the two sides could design and manufacture products that could make an impact all over the world.
During its visit to Taiwan, the Fujian group may have been thinking about unification, but they were careful not to talk too much about it.
“The buy-Taiwan group no doubt had a political purpose, but the Chinese have learned to push their political agenda in a more subtle way,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said.
That may explain why the delegation’s visits to Yunlin and Tainan — the stronghold of the pro-independence DPP — did not produce the kind of violent demonstrations that have marred earlier visits by senior Chinese envoys.
One of its highlights was a gala banquet attended by 106 Fujian town chiefs and other officials as well as their counterparts in Nantou County. With 40 chefs from Fujian doing the cooking, the banquet for 700 people was described by local media as the largest grass-roots exchange ever conducted between Taiwan and China.
On Sunday, a group of Chinese officials and tour operators visited Taipei’s Lin Family Garden and admired its Fujian-style pavilions and houses built in the 1840s by a Taiwanese millionaire, who was among the many immigrating to Taiwan from the Chinese province.
“This is one clear piece of evidence that we have the same roots and should get along well,” said Bao Guozhong, a tour operator from the Fujian capital of Fuzhou.
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