Can taxation agreement with China ever get signed?

Taiwan’s Strait Exchange Foundation (SEF) chairman is scheduled to hold negotiations with his Chinese counterpart on the Agreement for the Avoidance of Double Taxation and the Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with respect to Taxes on Income on Jan. 13, reports our Chinese-language sister newspaper Commercial Times.

The agreement will possibly be signed in the first half of 2015, as negotiations on the technical aspects of the agreement were already completed in November 2014.

SEF chairman Lin Join-sane is also reportedly optimistic on the signing of the agreement.

Negotiations on the agreement started in 2009, but were suspended in December of the same year at the Fourth Chen-Chiang summit, a cross-strait meeting, in Taiwan’s central city of Taichung, because there were “technical problems and further information to be shared,” according to the Commercial Times.

China intended to sign the agreement during the Seventh Chen-Chiang summit held in October 2011 in Tianjin, but the action was then put off until the Ninth Chen-Chiang summit when the document was put off again. Yet another signing attempt took place at the Tenth Chen-Chiang summit, but it also failed. This is why the signing has now been included in the agenda of the 11th Chen-Chiang summit in 2015.

Ma Shaw-chang, a spokesman for the SEF, said that the agreement would greatly impact the interests of Taiwanese businesspeople in China, and therefore the SEF needs the majority of Taiwanese businesspeople to understand its content. But Ma admitted that there are still many who do not know what the agreement is about.

According to the Commercial Times, the biggest obstacle to the signing of the agreement is are the many Taiwanese businesspeople who fear it would go against their interests.

During this five-day visit, Lin is scheduled to meet up with Taiwanese businesspeople in Hainan and Guangxi.