Agreements benefit all

Just as the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) president Chen Yunlin put it, it is all good stuff benefiting people on both sides.

Not just good. The agreements the ARATS and its Taiwan counterpart, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), signed yesterday present the best we can expect at this point.

The more recent concern about food safety aside, the agreements on direct flights, shipping and postal services were a dream come true. That dream lingered unfulfilled, ever since authorities on the mainland proposed to open up such links in a 1979 New Year's Day message to the people of Taiwan.

With the four documents inked, Chen had accomplished only half of what was scheduled for his trip. Yet the shared commitment to direct flights, shipping and postal services alone is worth all the words of praise we have heard. Because they deliver real benefits. We do have chartered flights on traditional holidays. Cargo ships can transport goods between the two sides. And snail mails can finally reach across the narrow Straits. But all with added costs, not values.

Currently all flights and ships have to make a detour to pass a third place for reasons nobody could convincingly clarify. According to China Southern Airlines figures, thanks to the Taiwan side's compulsory rule to fly over Hong Kong, a current one-way flight from Shanghai to Taipei takes one hour and 33 minutes more than a real direct flight, wasting 8.8 tons of gas.

Chen said earlier a main task of his trip is to cut corners. Not long hereafter, everybody traveling across the Straits can enjoy the fruit of the corner-cutting mission. And the Taiwan economy as a whole will find itself more competitive, not only on the mainland.

But Chen's Taiwan trip weighs heavily not only in terms of tangibles. In some ways, symbolism far outweighs the immediate gains that can be gauged with industry profits.

That Chen finally set foot on Taiwan soil itself is a historic breakthrough. With Chen there, we finally see an awkward gap filled - before this, there has been a conspicuous absence of reciprocity in interactions across the Straits. Never before had anybody of Chen's stature from the mainland been allowed to visit the island.

Chen's visit proves that cross-Straits interactions can steer clear of politics as long as both sides so agree. And the outcomes do not have to be one wins and the other loses. When Lian Chan, honorary chairman of the Taiwan-based Kuomintang, visited the mainland in April, he had in his entourage business executives whose combined market value accounts for more than half of that of all Taiwan companies. Today, Chen is visiting with business leaders whose total market value is more than half of all mainland-listed companies. Which means business.

With Chen's visit regularizing ARATS-SEF consultations, we can anticipate a virtuous cycle of rapport and practical benefits across the Straits. Face-to-face communication is the only way to make the impossible possible.

(China Daily 11/05/2008 page8)