You have been in office for three months. How would you categorise the current state of cross-strait relations?

The current state of relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is improving but there is a long way to go. We started with the cross-strait direct charter flights and the visits of mainland Chinese tourists. We moved on to deregulate investment restrictions for both sides. It’s a two-way street. We are also planning to negotiate further improvement of the current transportation from not just non-stop but adopting routes of the shortest distance and on sea transportation. We will open up sea ports in Taiwan to have free navigation with the mainland. And also the charter flights will include cargo, which is quite important to Taiwan’s hi-tech industry.

And the weekend charters will also become everyday charters, hopefully before the end of the year. And then we will move on to have scheduled flights, which require an air transport agreement and we hope we can get it concluded next year.

So the idea, basically, is to normalise our economic relationship with the mainland, which is fully warranted by the economic reality. As you know, our bilateral trade with the mainland has exceeded more than $120 billion (£66 billion). Forty per cent of our exports went to mainland China and we have a huge trade surplus with the mainland, much more than our overall trade surplus, meaning that if we had no trade with the mainland, we would have a deficit in international trade. Investment has also been phenomenal. The estimate varies from $60 billion to $280 billion and it’s quite clear that Taiwanese investment constitutes a very important part of the mainland economy.

And this again contributes to our exports to the mainland. Because our trade with the mainland is a typical investment-driven trade and so the economic reality requires that we take measures to catch up with the reality. And this is what we have been doing the last three months.

You talked about scheduled flights. How would you see those being negotiated?

We see it step by step, from weekend charters to everyday charters. In other words, we will increase our flights gradually and open up more cities, more airports. That will take some time. We have only eight airports. And not every airport is desirable for mainland tourists. This is the first time in 60 years so you can’t expect that every airport will be booming just after the inauguration of the flights. But I wouldn’t worry too much about that. When business opportunities come up it takes some time for people to develop adequate business models to take advantage of those opportunities that come along.

So far the number of people coming from the mainland is much lower than you anticipated. How can you change this?

Well, I think the Olympics has a lot to do with that. The mainland was a little bit reluctant to start in July because they preferred September. But when we started in July we can see that there were some tourists, but not sufficient. But on the other hand all the flights were full. The load factor could be as high as 95 per cent. Why? Because the need is there. The demand is there. And even now we have only 36 flights per weekend, which means Friday to Monday. Now the airline companies demand 130 flights. So the demand is tremendous. Last year, altogether 4.9 million trips were made across the Taiwan straits, two-way. I think this year may be more. So you can see, only 36 flights per week certainly cannot satisfy the demand of 4.9 million trips per year.

You mentioned the Olympics. How do you think that went for Taiwan in terms of the political participation?

Certainly that is a tremendous success for the mainland, as the coming out of a big power. On the other hand, you can also tell that for all the visitors, while they were awed by the grandeur of the opening and closing ceremonies and the splendour of the events and the athletes, but again they also have a long way to go to have other aspects of the society catch up with their brilliant performance of the Olympics. But for all those mainland Chinese this is a moment of glory and satisfaction after nearly 200 years of humiliation. This is only restoring its rightful position in the world. But still, as I said, there is a long way to go in terms of other values, which are also cherished by people not only outside of mainland China, but all Chinese people, like freedom, rule of law, democracy and protection of human rights.

So we certainly hope that the Olympic Games serve as the beginning of a new era for the Chinese as a whole.

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