A ranking justice official said Sunday that China has not been aggressive enough in helping to return Taiwanese fugitives who are hiding in the mainland. Nevertheless, Vice Justice Minister Wu Chen-huan said, Taiwan and China have been making great efforts to jointly crack down on crimes across the Taiwan Strait, in line with an agreement they struck last April and which took effect two months later. At a Taipei seminar held to mark the 20th anniversary of cross-strait scholastic exchanges in the field of law, Wu mentioned successes such as the busting of telephone and online fraud rings, and allowing family members to visit prisoners on the other side. However, while Taiwan has been quick to respond to Chins's requests for judicial assistance, this has not been the case on the other side, probably because of China's vast land area, he said. In addition, he noted, Taiwan has designated the Ministry of Justice as the single agency to deal with cross-strait judicial cooperation, while in China this responsibility is spread out among the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Public Security. 'Many of Taiwan's requests are pushed around among the different departments for quite a long time and some eventually get rejected, ' Wu said. He also raised the question of why most of the Taiwan fugitives arrested and repatriated by Chinese authorities are those wanted for crimes other than financial fraud. China has been criticized as being reluctant to send back the scores of Taiwanese who have fled to escape penalties for economic crimes, including Chen You-hao, former chairman of the now defunct Tuntex group. Chen fled to China in 2001 leaving around NT$60 billion (US$ 1,9 billion) in unpaid bank loans here. Wu urged the Chinese scholars at the seminar to help prompt the relevant mainland agencies to handle cross-strait cooperation in a more efficient way. 