Taiwan's indirect trade with China hit 65 billion US dollars in the first 11 months of 2005, up 16 per cent year-on- year, the Board of Foreign Trade (BOFT) said on Friday, according to Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa). During that period, Taiwan's exports to China totalled 46.9 billion dollars, up 14 per cent year-on-year, while imports from China were 18 billion dollars, up 20 per cent, making Taiwan's trade surplus with China 28.7 billion dollars. Since September 2005, China has replaced the United States as Taiwan's second largest source of imports after Japan, the BOFT said. The BOFT attributed the growth in Taiwan-China trade to a surge in Taiwan's exports of components for electronic products to China, which is becoming a global production base for electronic products. Another factor is that many Taiwan high-tech firms receive original-equipment manufacturing (OEM) orders from large foreign companies but make the products in China where labour is cheap. Taiwan's estimate of Taipei-Beijing trade is less than the figure released by China, probably because some Taiwan companies have not reported their trade with China to the BOFT. According to China's Commerce Ministry, for the whole year of 2005, China-Taiwan trade totalled 91 billion dollars, up 14 per cent from 2004's 78.3 billion dollars. Taiwan has banned political and trade ties with China since 1949 when the two sides split after the Chinese Civil War, but allowed indirect trade with China in 1987 as cross-Strait tensions thawed. --SP 22 27 Local Time 19 27 GMT
