Taiwan to appoint new China Affairs head, United Daily reports

Taiwan’s top mainland China affairs official, who participated in the first meeting between the Beijing and Taipei governments, will be replaced by a defense department official, according to a newspaper report.
Deputy defense minister Andrew Hsia will succeed Wang Yu-chi as minister of the Mainland Affairs Council, Taipei-based United Daily News reported yesterday, without saying where it got the information. President Ma Ying-jeou’s office declined to comment.
Wang offered his resignation this week hours after the Taipei District Prosecutors Office decided against charging Chang Hsien-yao, a former deputy minister of mainland affairs, with crimes related to the leaking of state secrets, citing insufficient evidence. The probe arose after Wang accused Chang of damaging the cross-strait relationship.
Relations between Taiwan and China reached a political pinnacle in February of last year, when Wang and his counterpart Zhang Zhijun, minister of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, met in the Chinese city of Nanjing, the first official contact between the governments since 1949. Zhang shook Wang’s hand and called him by his formal title.
China’s State Council Taiwan Affairs Office yesterday said Wang’s resignation won’t affect the normalized cross-strait communications mechanism, the official Xinhua News Agency reported earlier, citing Ma Xiaoguang who spoke at a scheduled press briefing.
A cross-strait trade agreement that would have opened as many as 80 service industries across the Taiwan Strait has been stalled since March, when university students occupied Taiwan’s legislature for 24 days to protest tactics used by the ruling Kuomintang party in an attempt to secure passage of the deal.
Calls to Hsia’s office at the Ministry of National Defense went unanswered yesterday. Chinmei Sung, Bloomberg