Early-harvest list is key to ECFA: sources

The sources said that it remains unclear as to whether the ECFA can be inked in mid-June as expected, as a ranking Chinese official in charge of cross-strait affairs said in a late May meeting in China with ranking officials of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang that the total value of mainland Chinese products and services included in the early-harvest list can be hiked to be closer to that of Taiwanese products and services.

The remarks of the Chinese official were interpreted by ranking KMT and government officials as that the mainland authorities hoped Taiwan could allow more Chinese products and services to be listed as early-harvest items.

With the complexity of the early-harvest list, the number of items on the list finalized by both sides may reach only 350 at most, instead of 500 to 600 as expected by both sides.

Ranking KMT officials said that top Chinese officials earlier reiterated China's policy to allow Taiwan to benefit more from the ECFA than the mainland, and therefore various sectors in Taiwan have been quite concerned about what benefits Taiwan can get.

At the moment, Taiwan's annual exports to mainland China reach around US$100 billion, accounting for a small portion of China's total imports. But China's annual shipments to Taiwan, estimated at US$30 billion, command a comparatively much larger ratio of the island's total imports.

Accordingly, if China demands equal market value of products and services on the early-harvest list, then it will give the impression that China's pledge to allow Taiwan to benefit more from the ECFA is only a lip of service.

Another key point that might affect the signing of the ECFA is that both Chinese government and industrial sectors have expressed hopes for the Economic Zone on the West Coast of the Taiwan Straits to be associated with the ECFA, so as to speed up the development of the zone.

But government officials here are worried that if Taiwan accepts the said economic zone as a trial base for the implementation of the ECFA, then opposition parties in Taiwan may blast the government for dwarfing Taiwan as a special administration region similar to Hong Kong and Macao. Accordingly, the government here has asserted that the ECFA has nothing to do with the Economic Zone on the West Coast of the Taiwan Straits.

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