President Ma Ying-jeou met on the morning of March 21 with US-Taiwan Business Council Chairman Paul D. Wolfowitz. In addition to extending a warm welcome to Mr. Wolfowitz and his delegation, on behalf of the government and people of the ROC the president also called for continued strengthening of cooperation and interaction to further enhance the relationship between Taiwan and the United States.
In remarks, President Ma recalled that Mr. Wolfowitz had last visited Taiwan in January of last year. The president said he is confident that Mr. Wolfowitz can sense new progress in the Taiwan-US relationship. In particular, Deputy US Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis led a delegation to Taiwan earlier this month to attend a meeting between the two countries under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA). The president remarked that he was pleased to see the resumption of these talks and that the bilateral cooperative economic and trade relationship creates a good foundation to solidify bilateral ties.
The president acknowledged that Taiwan still has challenges to overcome before it can join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, in the wake of the resumption of the TIFA negotiations, the international community will better understand that Taiwan is a trustworthy trading partner. At the same time, progress in the TIFA talks will help to create the conditions for Taiwan to eventually become a party to the TPP, he said. Furthermore, quite a few American companies have already made investments in Taiwan and the government here is formulating policies that will encourage Taiwan companies to invest in the United States, the president stated.
President Ma pointed out that a number of senior American officials and heavyweight Congressional delegations have visited Taiwan in the past two years, including Administrator Rajiv Shah of the US Agency for International Development, Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel B. Poneman, the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs Coordinator Dawn L. McCall, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs Jose W. Fernandez, and Under Secretary for International Trade at the Department of Commerce Francisco J. Sanchez. These visits indicate that relations between Taiwan and the United States have already seen significant improvement, he said.
The president noted that the ROC formally became the 37th member in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) on November 1, 2012, making the ROC the program's only participant with which the United States does not have formal diplomatic relations. The president cited statistics indicating that each year ROC nationals make over 400,000 visits to the United States. Now that Taiwan has been admitted to the VWP, he said, ROC nationals can save on visa fees, and application procedures have become much simpler. President Ma expressed confidence that the number of ROC nationals visiting the United States will increase, which will result in increased spending in the United States, enable the bilateral interaction to expand on many fronts, and foster increasingly close relations, he remarked.
With respect to the relationship between Taiwan and the United States, President Ma emphasized that he has strived to re-establish mutual trust at the highest levels of government since taking office. His administration, he said, has embraced a principle of "low key, no surprises" in its interaction with the United States, which has enabled the bilateral relationship to make significant strides forward. Over the past four years, the president said, the United States has agreed on three occasions to sell arms to Taiwan worth a combined total of over US$18 billion. These are the biggest arms sales in the past two decades in terms of both dollar amount and number of items purchased, he said. President Ma also commented that Taiwan and the United States maintain a high degree of cooperation on the Megaports Initiative, as well as in jointly fighting human trafficking, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism.
The president then turned the topic to cross-strait economic issues. He mentioned that in August of last year Taiwan and mainland China signed the Cross-Strait Bilateral Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement and the Cross-Strait Customs Cooperation Agreement. In addition, the two sides in December of last year inked the Memorandum on Currency Clearing Cooperation Across the Straits, enabling Taiwan to designate a bank in Shanghai to handle NT dollar clearing services in the mainland, he said. In the same fashion, the mainland Chinese authorities can designate a bank in Taiwan to handle RMB clearing services here. This constitutes an important step forward in cross-strait cooperation, the president remarked.
The delegation included President Rupert J. Hammond-Chambers of the US-Taiwan Business Council, Vice President Elizabeth Hernandez of Hewlett-Packard's Government Affairs of Asia-Pacific & Japan, and VISA North Asia Head of Government Relations David Katz. The group was accompanied to the Presidential Office in the morning by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ting Joseph Shih (石定) to meet President Ma. Also attending the meeting were Secretary-General to the President Timothy Chin-Tien Yang (楊進添) and National Security Council Secretary-General Jason C. Yuan (袁健生).