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China's top negotiator with Taiwan invited to return visit

ROC Central News Agency

2008-06-12 20:12:27

    Taipei, June 12 (CNA) Taiwan's top negotiator with China extended an invitation in Beijing Thursday to his Chinese counterpart to make a reciprocal visit to Taiwan later this year.

    Chiang Pin-kung, chairman of the Taiwan-based intermediary body the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), offered the invitation to Chen Yunlin, president of the quasi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), according to a SEF official.

    Chen gave Chiang a favorable response, saying that "he would visit Taiwan at an opportune time, " the official said in a news release.

    During their meeting at Beijing's Diaoyutai State Guesthouse for the first SEF-ARATS dialogue in nine years, both Chiang and Chen expressed hope that the two sides will reach consensus and agreement soon on the much-anticipated issues of direct cross-strait weekend charter flights and allowing Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan, according to the news release.

    Chiang, Chen and the other delegates at the meeting agreed that complementary talks on relevant technical issues, including cross-strait cargo charter flights, an increased number of weekend flights and the opening of more destinations and flight routes, will ensue without delay, the official said.

    They also agreed that the function of cross-strait contact and notification in the event of emergencies be resumed immediately.

    The negotiators also agreed that both intermediary organizations -- authorized in the 1990s to handle cross-strait exchanges in the absence of official ties -- will engage and push for a "normalization" of cross-strait business, trade and cultural exchanges, the official said in the news release.

    Chiang made a number of proposals during the meeting, including that the two sides start talking soon on the opening of cross-strait shipping links, joint exploration for undersea liquefied natural gas in the Taiwan Strait, cross-strait crime-fighting, expansion of the "mini three links" and cooperation in research into climate change and meteorology.

    A meeting between the late SEF Chairman Koo Chen-fu and the late ARATS President Wang Daohan in Singapore in 1993 led to a series of systematic exchanges between Taiwan and China, which had both avoided official contact since the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war.

    But the exchanges ground to a halt in 1999 when then-President Lee Teng-hui described cross-strait ties as a "special state-to-state relationship" and Beijing continued to refuse to enter dialogue with Taiwan during the eight-year administration of former President Chen Shui-bian of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.

    The icy relations began to warm up after the March 22 election of President Ma Ying-jeou, who has proposed that the two sides resume dialogue on the basis of the so-called "1992 consensus" that allows both sides to agree to disagree on the meaning of "one China."

(By Deborah Kuo)

ENDITEM/J