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Architect of better cross-Straits ties

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-04 07:47

Koo Chen-fu, late chairman of Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), was the island province's top negotiator with the Chinese mainland.

He is best remembered as a symbol of cross-Straits rapprochement and for arranging the first direct talks between the mainland and Taiwan.

Before emerging as a public figure, promoting cross-Straits ties, Koo had enjoyed decades of success in the corporate world. He was born in 1917 in the island province's third richest landlord family.

He became a businessman after inheriting large sums of family fortune while he was still in school in the 1930s.

Koo served a 19-month prison sentence in 1946, after which he sought refuge in Hong Kong. He returned to Taiwan in 1949 to marry Cecilia Koo. Since then, he not only focused on running his Koos Group, but also on a political career. He eventually became a member of the Central Standing Committee of the Kuomintang, Taiwan's ruling Party, in 1981.

He was chosen the chairman of SEF, when it was set up in Taipei in 1990. Koo and the then Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits president, Wang Daohan, held two formal meetings, in Singapore in 1993 and in Shanghai in 1998. The "Wang-Koo meetings" greatly improved across-Straits ties.

Koo died of renal cancer in 2005.

China Daily

(China Daily 11/04/2008 page2)