Despite the reservations and concerns of opposition parties and representatives of service industries in Taiwan, the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits signed a cross-strait service trade agreement in Shanghai last week. This was a prime example of the “close party-to-party negotiations” model used by the two “Chinese” parties — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — that is currently monopolizing cross-strait relations.