Asia Times: China


	May 16, 2002	atimes.com

China

Taiwan: Something's in the air
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - "Taiwan-Kong Kong air pact negotiations stall" read a headline of the front page of the Taiwan News, an English language daily, on Tuesday. "MAC [Mainland Affairs Commission - Taiwan's principle setter of cross-strait policy] says aviation talks on track" said a page 2 headline in the rival Taipei Times.

Exasperated readers - and the 5,000 or so Taiwanese who fly to Hong Kong every day - might wonder what is going on. More to the point, will anyone be able to fly from Taiwan to Hong Kong after the end of June when the current agreement runs out? And what might this confusion over Hong Kong tell us about the schizophrenia that characterizes Taiwan policy on the tricky topic of links with China?

First, which paper got it right? Well, they both did, the News because talks did break down and the Times because the MAC did claim that they hadn't. The reason for both the breakdown and the MAC's reticence about it is that Taiwan, in its negotiations, is subtly trying to change the rules of the game, to which the Hong Kong side is not amenable.

In 1996, the two sides concluded an air agreement after lengthy delays over whether the Hong Kong government could negotiate directly with its Taiwan counterpart. Partly because of the "One China" policy of the British government, at the time the ruler of Hong Kong, according to which relations with Taiwan could only be "unofficial in nature", and partly due to the wishes of Beijing, the Hong Kong side deemed it inappropriate to engage in direct talks with the relevant Taiwan authorities - the Civil Aeronautical Administration. There was then a long and somewhat farcical standoff between the two sides during which threats that direct flights between the two would cease on a given date, a previous agreement was extended for another six months every six months, until one side or the other blinked.

In the end it was Taiwan that gave ground, by allowing a private association of its airlines to negotiate directly with their Hong Kong counterparts, which had been authorized by the Hong Kong authorities to negotiate a mutually acceptable trading of landing slots. Hong Kong is so satisfied with this formula that it wants to negotiate another agreement on the same basis. And the same mechanism was also later used by Hong Kong to negotiate a similar air agreement with Macau.

Taiwan, however, has found fault with the this method. The reasons cited by the government are that the old agreement just covered landing slots. This time Taiwan wants a more extensive agreement covering ticket prices, flight numbering, the establishment of offices and more detailed procedures for flight crew entering and leaving the country. But all this seems to be a justification for Taiwan's claim that the negotiations must be government-to-government in nature, the idea being that the agreement covers such a diverse range of issues that only the government has the latitude needed to negotiate.

Currently the two sides have negotiating teams, but these teams are more in the business of deciding what their delegated negotiators are going to talk about, rather than actually negotiating themselves. Nether side will officially report on the state of play, which leaves the reasons for the sudden and unexpected termination of talks on Monday, just three hours after they started, open to speculation.

Nevertheless, officials from Taiwan's CAA have said sotto voce that the reason for the abrupt termination of discussion was that the MAC insisted that the new air agreement had to be negotiated government-to-government - something that the Hong Kong side could not accept. The MAC member of Taiwan's eight-person team, Jan Jyh-hong, on Monday insisted that this was not the case and that the issue of who was to sign the agreement never came up. But CAA chief Chang Kuo-cheng told the media that "this time we want to sign a real agreement", which is taken to mean an agreement between governments rather then the commercial arrangement between companies that is now coming to the end of its second six-month extension while these talks continue.

With the lack of firm information, Taipei is rife with speculation that it is the MAC's stance that the governments must negotiate the agreement which led to a Hong Kong walkout. As interesting is the appearance that, CAA chief's Chang's remarks notwithstanding, there is huge dissension in the CAA from its boss's expressed view and the MAC's policy lead on this matter. This should surprise nobody who has followed the tortuous question of whether Taiwan will ever open direct transportation, communication and business links with China, suspended since 1949.

At least since the mid-1990s there has been tension between those government agencies specializing in transportation, such as the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the CAA, and the MAC. The transport specialists have lobbied for a speeding up of direct links with China, and the MAC, which tends to take precedence in Taiwan government circles, has invariably crushed any optimism at the earliest opportunity.

What has given the MAC the power to do this is that its conservatism has, at least until now, had the support of the president. The previous president Lee Teng-hui was perhaps the most conservative of all government officials when it came to any possible opening toward China. He also tended to overestimate the strength of Taiwan's hand, holding out direct links only in return for Beijing's dropping its threat to reunify by force, something which perhaps no Chinese leader dare do. Lee believed that security concerns and Taiwan's dignity overrode any other concerns and that opening links of almost any sort on less than a government-to-government basis was to be avoided.

Since his election in 2000, the current President Chen Shui-bian has tended to follow Lee's lead. He has paid lip-service to wider opening with China, in theory abandoning the old policy of imposing ceilings on private sector investment in China and prohibiting investment in certain sectors - know as the "no haste, be patient" with a new policy of "active opening, effective management" in which Taiwan is supposed to freely allow investment across the Strait and welcome investment from China subject to monitoring mechanisms being in place to make sure that none of this is detrimental to Taiwan's status quo.

Almost a year after the government signed on to this policy, it is beset by criticism that there is far to much attention being paid to "effective management" and not nearly enough to "active opening".

But Chen might now be moving toward overriding the MAC's traditional conservatism in using the private sector to create "functional" links while official links are still in the deep freeze.

On a visit to the south of Taiwan last week, Chen told a bunch of media executives that he was considering allowing private organizations to negotiate with China on the issue of direct links. "Substance is much more important than style," Chen told the media group. "We have to consider practical ways to contact mainland China." While the government had a role to play, Chen said, it did not always have to be the "frontline negotiator". Chen even spoke approvingly of the Hong Kong aviation agreement model as a way in which cross-Strait transportation links might be opened.

Chen's remarks were the first indication so far that the government has a model, other than government-to-government talks, which are out of the question until the mood in Beijing changes, of how cross-Strait links might be brought about.

Almost no sooner had Chen made his remarks than the MAC was trying to spin them into insignificance. The government, said MAC chairwoman Tsai Ying-wen, had no intention of devolving negotiating powers to private or commercial organizations and was only prepared to use their expertise to facilitate negotiations.

But in Washington on Monday, Taiwan's Transportation Minister Lee Ling-san told a luncheon organized by the US-Taiwan Business Council that Chen's remarks did in fact reflect the government's intentions, but that since the policy was at a planning stage, there was little practical information that he could provide. If the links are purely commercial in nature - such as a matter of trading landing slots - then commercial organizations might negotiate. The government's concern basically centered around matters of immigration control, customs and quarantine, Lin said. Routes, costs and schedules of cross-Strait transportation can be decided by the companies involved.

Lin's speech lacked the hard information that might characterize it as a policy statement. It more closely resembled a statement of intent. The Chen government appears to think that the Hong Kong model can be extended to the mainland. And it also appears to be unwilling to allow the MAC to retain a veto of such plans.

Partly, this is simply a case of giving the people what they want. Taiwanese overwhelmingly want direct links with China. The current system of flying into China via a change of planes in Hong Kong makes what should be a cheap, cross-Strait hop from Taipei to Shanghai take all day and cost the same as a trans-Pacific flight (more than US$500). Opinion polls show that about 70 percent of Taiwanese want direct links.

But it is also an interesting political strategy by Chen, designed to steal from the opposition parties their only drawng card, namely that they can improve relations with China and Chen can't. Perhaps they are right: Chen's identification with Taiwan independence puts him beyond the pale as a figure with which Beijing currently is willing to do business.

But for most Taiwanese, improving relations with China usually means really little more than diminishing the obstacles to going to China and doing business there. If Chen can bring about direct links in some way using commercial rather than governmental organizations, this will be deemed a significant improvement, however little it does to reduce the number of missiles in southeast China pointed across the Strait.

So worried is the opposition by Chen's apparent new willingness to tackle direct links on a practical level that it intends next month to introduce a bill in Taiwan's legislature calling for a lifting on the ban on direct links. This is essentially meaningless because the ban is an executive, not legislative matter. But it is a measure of how seriously the opposition takes the threat of Chen's stealing their clothes that they are wrapping themselves in them all the tighter.

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