Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Monday, March 24, 2008 0:00 am TWN, By Joe Hung, Special to The China Post

Sponsors
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.

Deng’s proposal to Taiwan in 1982

The thaw Chiang Ching-kuo worked on frozen relations across the Strait accelerated the people-to-people exchanges, the indirect trade and investment, along with cultural exchanges between Taiwan and China. At first it was a trickle. Two-way trade via Hong Kong totaled US$278.5 million in 1982. It accounted for 0.68 percent of Taiwan’s worldwide trade, which amounted to US$41.095 billion. The volume of cross-strait trade continued to go up in the years before Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988. In that year, cross-strait trade soared to US$2.721 billion. However, it still represented a mere 2.47 percent of Taiwan’s trade with the rest of the world. Taipei did not have to worry about whether it should make official contact with Beijing regarding trade between Taiwan and China. His “no contact” policy was firmly in place.

By 1998 Taiwan’s trade with China increased more than nine times its volume in 1988, zooming up to US$23.915 billion or 11.13 percent of its worldwide total. Like its trade with China, Taiwan’s foreign investment in that country still remains an indirect one. Taipei, which had turned a blind eye to investment in China for more than two decades, finally adopted a set of regulations governing indirect investment in China in August 1990, two years after Chiang’s death. According to official statistics, which were made available after 1992, there were altogether 21,646 cases of investment, from 1952 through 1998. China is now Taiwan’s largest trading partner and has received US$13,242 billion in foreign investment from Taiwan. In fact, 41.57 percent of Taiwan’s foreign investment as of the end of 1998 went to China. On the other hand, more than two million people had exchanged visits across the Strait as of the end of the twentieth century. All forms of exchange and interchange are now regulated by the Statute Governing the Relations Between the Peoples of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area, promulgated in 1992.

Chiang Ching-kuo’s “three-no” China policy was not enforced to the letter. Pragmatism made him allow the “no contact” rule to be flexibly implemented. Government and Kuomintang officials were forbidden to visit China or get into contact with their Chinese counterparts, but people-to-people contact was lawful. Indirect economic exchanges, though not officially licit, were carried on apace. In fact, Chiang laid the foundation for a detente his successor Lee Teng-hui achieved between the two sides of the Strait in the early 1990s. That detente came to an abrupt end in the last year of the decade, and cross-Strait relations plunged to a record low after the Democratic Progressive Party came into power in 2000.

(To be continued)

1|2|3