Chinas in a bull session

WHEN arch-enemies get together to negotiate a groundbreaking free-trade pact, as Taiwan and China did on March 31st and April 1st, things are never likely to be easy. Few details emerged from the secretive talks, held at a remote rural resort in Taiwan, where protesters wearing pointed straw farmer's hats scuffled with police along a barricaded, wooded serpentine road. The negotiators, Tang Wei, a senior official with China's commerce ministry, and Huang Chih-peng, the director-general of Taiwan's foreign-trade bureau, would say only that the pact would not lift restrictions on 834 Chinese agricultural imports, nor slash existing tariffs, nor produce an influx of mainland Chinese workers. The hope is that this will help win over the Taiwanese public and strike a blow at the pact's opponents, including Taiwan's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).