14 b STRATEGIC VISION
photo: ROC Presidential Office New Zealand representative Stephen Payton and National Security Council Secretary-General Jason Yuan celebrate the signing of the FTA.
there are already voices in China calling for an equalization of the disparate early harvest projections. Chen Deming, who succeeded Chen Yunlin in April as chairman of China’s quasi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), said at a press conference during the CCP’s 18th National Congress last November that Taiwan should put the principle of equality into practice by giving mostfavored-nation treatment to Chinese goods in cases where its markets are open to similar goods from other countries. Second, China’s unilateral concession did not come with no strings attached. Wang Yi, who was recently appointed China’s minister of foreign affairs, was quoted in the July 1, 2012, issue of the Qiushi Journal (a CCP organ) as saying that, “at present, we are seizing opportunities … to consolidate cross-strait relations. In turn, this will allow us to go on creating favorable conditions for China’s peaceful reunification.” Clearly, the economic opening was proffered by China with expectations of a political quid pro
quo to follow. For the time being, however, political talks with China are not on Taiwan’s list of negotiation priorities. Most Taiwanese merely want to engage with China for pure economic and trade purposes. This does not mean the two sides must put their political cards on the table anytime in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, the average Taiwanese worries that the old adage “political issues follow economic ones” will prove more or less true, and this fear influences the Taiwanese attitude toward further economic cooperation with Beijing. Third, with each passing month, Taiwan is becoming more and more anxious about the lack of progress in signing FTAs with its other trading partners. In order to make the ECFA deal more palatable to the Taiwanese electorate, the KMT’s white paper on ECFA promised, among other things, that it would convince Beijing to allow Taipei to enter into FTAs with other countries. Now, almost three years after ECFA took effect, there has been distressingly little forward motion on this front.
Further trade pacts After signing ECFA, Taiwan started talks on trade pacts with Singapore and New Zealand, the latter of which was signed on July 10, 2013. However, both of those countries combined account for a paltry 3.8 percent of Taiwan’s total trade, and the extent of deregulation under a cross-strait agreement on trade in services may be limited. Even if all these agreements are signed, they will be of limited assistance to Taiwan and will not be enough to get it out of its current isolation. Still, the psychological effect of such FTAs would have been a boost to national morale, and to the popularity of the KMT administration. Currently, there exist three large-scale economic integration regimes under negotiation in the AsiaPacific region that threaten to eclipse Taiwan’s par-