Hangzhou, Sept. 4 (CNA) China's top negotiator with Taiwan said Thursday the "ball is in Taiwan's court" regarding the signing of a bilateral trade-in-goods agreement.

Chen Deming, head of China's Associations for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), also said it could be "difficult" to finalize the pact before China and South Korea sign a free trade agreement (FTA).

China's FTA negotiations with South Korea are progressing smoothly and are 90 percent complete, he said after a meeting in China with his Taiwanese counterpart, Lin Join-sane, head of the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF).

But even if the negotiations between both sides of the Taiwan Strait could be completed before the FTA is signed, there will be still be a long process in Taiwan to adopt the trade-in-goods pact, Chen said.

China will try to "maintain proper equilibrium on all sides" in its negotiations with South Korea, he said. "But the China-South Korea FTA is likely to be completed sooner" than the trade-in-goods pact, Chen said.

Noting that a bill to monitor cross-strait agreements is still stalled in Taiwan's Legislature, he said there is no chance of the trade-in-goods pact clearing the Legislature before that bill is passed.

"The ball is not in our court, but in Taiwan's court," Chen said.

Lin, who is leading a delegation of foundation board members and supervisors on a visit to Ningbo and Hangzhou cities in Zhejiang, said the executive and legislative branches in Taiwan check and balance each other and there are varying opinions in a democratic society.

A cross-strait trade-in-services agreement signed last year remains stalled in Taiwan's Legislature after it spurred massive public protests earlier this year.

In the wake of the student-led protests, the Taiwan government agreed to process the bill on monitoring cross-strait pacts before the controversial trade-in-services agreement.

Chen said that although the pact-monitoring bill it stalled in Taiwan's Legislature, it has not affected the ongoing consultations between the semi-official SEF and ARATS.

Taiwan and China are set to resume negotiations Sept. 10 on the trade-in-goods pact after a 10-month interval.

(By Scarlet Chai and Lilian Wu) CNA