President Ma Ying-jeou said Friday that the evolution of the relations between the former East and West Germany can serve as a model for Taiwan and China. Ma recalled that when he was vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) 20 years ago, he visited Germany many times to study how East and West Germany handled their bilateral affairs prior to their reunification in 1990. 'The Statute Governing the Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area was the result of those fact-finding efforts, ' Ma told Horst M. Teltschik, who served as a national security advisor to former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Teltschik was part of the policy-making process that resulted in the unification of East and West Germany. Ma said he hopes Telschik will share with Taiwan some of Germany's experience in handing the relations between the two sides prior to unification, as this could prove useful in cross-strait affairs. The president, however, noted that there are major differences between the development of cross-strait and East-West German relations. For example, people-to-people exchanges come before government-to- government interaction between Taiwan and China, he said. In addition to facilitating huge flows of trade and investment across the strait, Taiwan and China have signed 14 agreements, including a recently concluded economic cooperation framework agreement that institutionalizes trade and economic ties, Ma said. 