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Taiwan-China relations progress at
glacial pace
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Progress is possible in
Taiwan-China relations - it just proceeds at a
pace more in glacial terms than in
human-historical terms.
The news is that
Taiwan and China have agreed to let six airlines
from either side of the Taiwan Strait run charter
flights between the two sides of the strait (more
on that word "between" later) for three weeks over
the Lunar New Year holiday period, which starts a
week from Saturday. The reality is that it has
taken three years to move from a suggestion as to
how these negotiations might take place to their
actually happening.
In the deal made last
weekend, each side will operate 24 return charter
flights over the Lunar New Year period on routes
connecting Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in
mainland China with Taipei and Kaohsiung in
Taiwan. The flights are specifically to enable
Taiwanese businessmen who work in China and their
families to return home for the holiday. No one
else may travel, so don't try to book a ticket.
But do not mistake such limitations as a
sign of unimportance. The restrictions are in fact
a sign of Taiwan's super-cautious attitude to what
will, when it happens, be the biggest change in
relations across the Taiwan Strait since 1949 -
direct transportation links.
In the late
1980s Taiwan, just emerging from 38 years of
martial law, started letting its people visit
China without trying to throw them in jail when
they returned. The move, made originally for
humanitarian reasons of letting exiles living in
Taiwan visit their families in China, has changed
more than its fair share.
In the wake of
old soldiers went young entrepreneurs, and
eventually more than US$100 billion in investment
and a very large chunk of Taiwan's manufacturing
industry (Taiwanese have more than 70,000
factories in China), which played a crucial role,
especially in the wake of the hands-off attitude
of Western countries to post-Tiananmen China, to
making the People's Republic the economic giant it
has become. Now China is on the verge of becoming
the world's biggest information-technology (IT)
producer, almost entirely a result of the inflow
of Taiwanese money and know-how. Meanwhile, it has
also become Taiwan's biggest export destination.
Despite the economic boom, politics
between the two sides has stayed stuck in the Cold
War era. China claims Taiwan and refuses to deal
with its government in any way, occasionally
threatening violence if Taiwan does not "reunify".
Many officials and residents of Taiwan claim it is
an independent state that cannot "reunify" because
it has never been a part of the People's Republic,
nor do its people show any interest in
unification, for which, under its democratic
system, they would have to vote. After a brief
thaw in the early 1990s, China closed down the
"non-official" negotiation mechanism in 1995 - in
anger at then-president Lee Teng-hui's attempts to
widen Taiwan's international influence - and they
haven't been opened since.
All of this has
been frustrating to the business community,
because Taiwan has kept in place a policy that, in
theory, only political negotiations could lift -
one banning direct transportation, commerce and
communications with China. Since the early 1990s,
a regular topic of inquiry has been when the
"three links" would be established.
It is
more usual today to talk about "direct links", if
only because at least two of the three
restrictions have been successfully overcome.
Letters can be sent and phone calls made across
the Taiwan Strait, even if they are routed via
Japan. Money can flow across the strait, even if
it is done via subsidiary offices in Hong Kong.
The final link that remains to be breached is
direct transportation; there still isn't any.
For business people this is inconvenient,
but not disastrous. It is annoying to have to fly
to Hong Kong, change planes, then fly on to cities
in China, but perhaps no more than that. For
shipping, however, it is a different matter;
direct links might cut shipping costs by up to 30%
- no small amount given the high-volume,
low-margin nature of Taiwanese industries in
China, for most of whom shipping is a key
component.
Despite the importance of
direct shipping, it is nevertheless air links on
which attention on both sides of the strait is
concentrated. This is partly because to open them
involves a higher degree of trust - Taiwan wants
to be sure that the planes approaching on its
radar are harmless civilian aircraft. The problem
is that opening air links requires some degree of
communication between governments, but Beijing
will only talk to Taipei officials on conditions
that Taipei cannot - and might never - accept.
In 2002, however, Taiwan's agreement with
Hong Kong over air links came up for renewal for
the first time since the handover of the territory
to Chinese control in 1997. The idea of breaking
off links with Hong Kong was so preposterous that
Taiwan long before the handover had deemed it not
a part of China proper. This piece of pragmatic
sophistry allowed it to keep both links with the
territory and the "direct links" ban. The Hong
Kong government, however, saw itself as a part of
China, with the usual prohibition of having
anything to do with Taiwanese officials. How was
the air-links agreement to be renegotiated?
In the end it was "negotiated" between two
private associations representing Hong Kong and
Taiwanese airlines. "Helping" them were government
transportation officials from both sides, serving
not in their official capacity but technically
moonlighting as "advisers". And the system worked
very well; face was saved, protocol adhered to and
a deal was made.
Later that year Taiwanese
President Chen Shui-bian suggested that a similar
mechanism might be used to negotiate links with
China itself. In mid-August 2003 the Taiwan
government released a report on just how such
links might work. Last weekend the new negotiation
mechanism with China had its first outing, and on
January 29 the first civilian non-stop flight from
China to Taiwan for more than 55 years will arrive
in Taipei.
This is not the first time that
Taiwan-China charter flights have operated. For
the Lunar New Year in 2003 there were flights, but
they were restricted to a Shanghai-Taipei route
and had to land in Hong Kong before flying on to
Taiwan to keep to the letter of the direct-links
ban. Last year there were no such flights, since
China wanted to make Chen Shui-bian, whom it
loathes, appeared ineffectual before the Taiwan
presidential election in March. Taiwan's election
cycle has in fact seriously hindered progress on
direct links, the presidential poll and
legislative elections in December precluding any
measure of cooperation from China until their
conclusion.
On January 10, however, a
delegation for the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) met
with the director of China's Taiwan Affairs
Office, Chen Yunlin, to discuss the possibility of
flights this year. While they swiftly reached an
agreement, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) in
Taipei, Taiwan's mainland-policy ministry and a
perennial dog in the manger over any advance in
ties, was swift to point out that the KMT had no
real negotiating capacity and that only government
officials could negotiate any deal.
Chen
Shui-bian decided to override the MAC, and last
Friday a delegation left Taipei for Macau
consisting of Taipei Airlines Association (TAA)
chairman Lo Ta-hsin and secretary general Solo Su,
along with Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA)
- Taiwan's air ministry - director general Billy
Chang and official Fang Chi-wen. In Macau they met
Pu Zhaozhou, the head of the Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Macau Affairs Department of the Civil Aviation
Administration of China (CAAC), the CAA's
counterpart, and three other CAAC officials. A
deal on the Lunar New Year flights was reached
within 90 minutes.
The negotiations were
interesting in that they took the original Hong
Kong model a step further. China was apparently
happy to let officials talk to the Taiwanese as
long as they were not technically negotiating with
government officials. The idea that they were
talking with Lo and Su of the TAA, with Chang just
an adviser on the sidelines, might be a fiction,
but it was a pragmatic face-saving one, and things
went swimmingly. As for Taiwan, it appears happy
to talk to Chinese officials, which all the
Chinese delegation were.
The significance
of the deal should not be underestimated. The
set-up over the Lunar New Year period is identical
to that announced in Taiwan's 2003 report. Planes
will travel to and from multiple destinations,
carriers from both sides will be involved and all
planes must fly through the airspace of a third
territory; Hong Kong or Macau for routes from
Shanghai and Guangzhou, and probably Okinawa for
flights to Beijing. Hence the flights are
"between" both sides of the strait rather than
across the strait itself. The 2003 report said
that all direct flights must detour in this way,
since Taiwan's military simply would not approve
of planes flying directly across the Taiwan Strait
- given that a Chinese fighter jet can cross it in
less than 10 minutes.
Except for the fact
that the flights are allowed only for a limited
period and restricted as to who may use them,
there is no difference between the Lunar New Year
arrangement and how real direct air links will
operate - at least until a level of trust is built
up to allow flights directly across the Taiwan
Strait itself.
Nobody expects the flights
to make money; how could they, since their custom
is entirely one-way - to Taiwan before the holiday
and from Taiwan afterward? Carriers are interested
in the flights as a way of staking claims to
eventual routes, while the governments want to see
if the plan can be made to work smoothly. If it
does, and it is hard to see why it would not,
there is no reason the Macau meeting formula used
to set up the flights might not be used very
quickly to set up scheduled direct flights before
the end of the year. Once this is done, shipping
will very rapidly follow.
And perhaps much
more than that, because with direct air links
Taiwan will be a long way to lifting its tight
restrictions on Chinese visiting the island. This
is seen as essential to its tourist industry, but
it might be far more important than that.
Currently Taiwan simply doesn't produce enough IT
technicians to keep up with its own demand - given
that so many of its engineers are, ironically,
working in China. There is, therefore, a slow
realization that the opening of Taiwan's labor
market to highly qualified Chinese may be
essential to the island's prosperity. And the
possible social changes either side of the strait
that might result from that could be as momentous
for Greater China as the economic opening of the
early 1990s.
Laurence Eyton is
deputy editor-in-chief of the Taipei Times. He has
worked in Taiwan for 18 years.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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