Taipei, May 30 (CNA) Vice President Annette Lu urged Taiwan businessmen Friday not to invest "blindly" in mainland China after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic.
Lu made the remarks when she attended a ceremony to mark an agreement signed between Civil Aeronautics Administration Director-General Chang Kuo-cheng and Far Glory Air Cargo Park Co. Chairman Yeh Chun-yao on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) project for a Taoyuan Air Cargo Park.
The vice president said that the flu-like atypical pneumonia has become a global health hazard since its outbreak on the mainland and she added that Beijing has yet to apologize for the outbreak. Businessmen should not expect to invest in the mainland without any misgivings, she said.
Lu speculated that after the SARS epidemic, personnel exchanges will not be as close as in the past, but other exchanges will not stop, with the Internet and e-commerce becoming more important.
As such, she continued, Taiwan needs to speed up the process of developing itself into a logistics center in the Asia and Pacific region so as to ensure it has a niche in the international community.
She said that SARS cases have been reported in 26 mainland provinces and that the risks of investing there are too high.
Lu said that the Taoyuan Air Cargo Park BOT project is one of the NT$100 billion (US$2.857 billion) BOT projects that the government is promoting this year and added that the Taoyuan project will be a good start for building Taiwan into a free trade zone.
The signing ceremony was presided over by Vice Premier Lin Hsin-i and Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Ling-shan.