Asia Times: New cross-Strait services enjoy smooth start


	August 21, 2001	atimes.com

China

New cross-Strait services enjoy smooth start

TAIPEI - Direct sea-air transshipment services across the Taiwan Strait have had a smooth start, with the first installment of cargo from mainland China being airlifted to Europe via Taiwan last week.

Airline sources said on Thursday that the Taiwan's decision to expand the functions of its Kaohsiung offshore cross-Strait transshipment center to cover airborne transshipment services has received a positive response from manufacturers in China. The first batch of mainland cargo to use this new channel for transshipment was shipped to the southern Taiwan port of Kaohsiung from China's Xiamen, via a vessel of the Taiwan-based Uniglory Marine Corp on Wednesday. The 17 tons of cargoes, which would be airlifted to Europe and the United States in three installments, were then transported to CKS International Airport in northern Taiwan via truck.

The first instalment, weighing more than two tons, was airlifted to Paris via an EVA Airways cargo plane on Wednesday evening.

EVA sources said before the opening of the airborne transshipment services, it took five to seven days to send goods from China to Europe via the Kaohsiung offshore transshipment center. "Now, it takes only 48 hours for the cargoes to reach Paris," said an EVA executive.

The two remaining instalments of goods were airlifted to Amsterdam and New York, respectively, via EVA cargo planes on Thursday.

The EVA executive said as the export destinations of mainland Chinese goods cover a wide range of areas, the newly opened cross-Strait sea-air transshipment services can help enhance mainland exporters' speed and flexibility in cargo delivery.

Both Uniglory Marine and EVA Airways are affiliates of Taiwan's Evergreen Group, which operates the world's largest container shipping fleet. The EVA executive said because Evergreen Group has a convenient sea-land-air transport network in Europe and the United States, it has managed to become the first company to offer direct cross-Strait sea-air transshipment services to mainland Chinese manufacturers.

The sea-air cross-Strait links came one month after Taiwan's Ministry of Transportation and Communications amended regulations to expand cross-Strait transportation links. Taiwan in 1997 inaugurated limited marine links across the Strait in which mainland-originating goods can be shipped to the offshore shipping center in Kaohsiung for transshipment to other parts of the world. But the goods cannot be unloaded in the island.

Wu Chin-min, president of the Evergreen Marine Corp, estimated that the cargo - most of which will be electronic products produced by Taiwan-invested plants in Fujian - transported through the newly opened line, will reach between 1,000 tons and 4,000 tons per month.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) said on Thursday it plans to further expand the functions of the Kaohsiung offshore transshipment center to include direct cross-Strait air-sea transshipment services, under which mainland China-bound goods from third countries can be airlifted to Taiwan's two international airports for transport via ship from Kaohsiung Harbor to mainland ports.

Nevertheless, trade sources said the demand for such a type of transshipment services may not be large.

In the future, MOTC Vice Minister Ho-Chen Tan said the Kaohsiung offshore transshipment center may also be allowed to handle export processing and packaging for mainland products to be exported to other countries. At present, mainland goods to be transshipped to other countries via Kaohsiung can neither clear customs nor enter Taiwan proper.

Ho-Chen said if the soon-to-be-convened Economic Development Advisory Conference manages to reach a conclusion on further easing cross-Strait transportation services, the MOTC will revise current regulations governing the offshore transshipping center operations to accommodate the above-mentioned new services.

Oil exploration plan revived
A joint-venture plan involving flagship Taiwan and mainland Chinese petroleum corporations exploring for oil in the Taiwan Strait has recently been revived after a five-year hiatus. A draft agreement on the plan was jointly inked in 1996 by Overseas Petroleum Investment Co (OPIC), an offshoot of Taiwan's state-run Chinese Petroleum Corp (CPC), and the Beijing-based China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), featuring joint oil exploration in waters located southeast of the mouth of mainland China's Zhujiang (Pearl River), CPC sources said late last week.

Encompassing 15,400 square kilometers, the targeted area straddles the imaginary demarcation mid-line in the Taiwan Strait that has been tacitly accepted by both Taipei and Beijing for decades.

The OPIC-CNOOC cooperative project was called to a halt later in 1996 after former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui called for the "no haste, be patient" policy to curb fast-growing Taiwan economic and business expansion into mainland China.

If everything goes smoothly, a formal pact on the OPIC-CNOOC cooperation is expected to be formally signed by the end of this year, paving the way for the two companies to launch formal exploratory drilling, probably in 2002, CPC officials said.

The cooperative project is expected to usher in a new era of cooperation between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in exploring for and tapping oil reserves in the Taiwan Strait and other areas.

Under the initial contract, OPIC and CNOOC will each contribute US$500,000 for oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) exploration in the targeted area, which lies 250 kilometers southwest of the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung and 150 km south of the city of Swatow in the mainland Chinese province of Guangdong.

Experts from both sides are optimistic about the prospects of the cooperative project, saying that the targeted area is rich in oil and LNG resources. The seven fields found over the years near the mouth of the Pearl River are expected to produce about 10 million tons of petroleum per year, they added.

Before the implementation of the Taiwan's "no haste, be patient" policy, high-ranking officials from CPC and CNOOC had met many times on different occasions for seminars and workshops, tangibly for the cross-Strait joint oil exploration project. The meetings included former CPC chairman Chang Tzu-yuan's visit to Beijing in 1995 to meet with CNOOC officials, and CNOOC president Wang Yen's visit to Taipei in 1996, as well as meetings between executive officials from both companies in Guangzhou, Singapore and the United States for talks on technical issues, according to CPC officials.

(Asia Pulse)

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