Taiwan chief fails to appease protesting students

A negotiation over the cross-Strait service trade agreement between protesting students and Jiang Yi-huah, chief of Taiwan's administrative authority, failed on Saturday afternoon.

The dialogue outside the legislative building in Taipei lasted only 13 minutes before Jiang was asked to leave by student leader Lin Fei-fan. During the disrupted conversation, Jiang promised to the crowd he would not use police to disperse the students.

Hundreds of students maintained a grip on the assembly hall for the fourth day on Saturday, having stormed the building on Tuesday evening in protest at the KMT's decision to bypass a detailed review of the pact.

Responding to Lin's requests to retract the service pact and pass another on supervision of all cross-Strait agreements, the administrative chief said he had no such plan.

"The Administrative Yuan believes the pact will be greatly beneficial to Taiwan's future liberalization and internationalization," Jiang said. "But we do hope for a substantial and clause-by-clause review of the pact in the Legislative Yuan."

Jiang added that the KMT had agreed to let the legislative authority and the public gradually join in the supervision of the pact, while his response to supervisory legislation was drowned out by students chanting slogans.

Jiang was cut short when Lin insisted the dialogue could not go on without positive answers to the two demands. Students would continue their sit-in, Lin said.

A follow-up agreement to the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, the service trade pact was signed in June and promises to open up 80 of the Chinese mainland's service sectors to Taiwan and 64 of Taiwan's sectors to the mainland.