The Chinese mainland and Taiwan should build mutual trust in order to resolve long-standing sensitive disputes such as political and military issues, a mainland spokesman said on Wednesday.

"Such issues could be not sidestepped in the development of a cross-Strait relationship," Yang Yi, spokesman of the State Council (cabinet) Taiwan Affairs Office, told a regular press conference.

"The most immediate thing to do is to establish mutual trust to accumulate more consensus and... sort out those tough issues step by step," Yang said.

Director of the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, Wang Yi, made a comment when meeting the Taiwan-based Straits Exchange Foundation chairman Chiang Pin-kung in Nanjing last month that the two sides should give priority to establishing mutual trust and gradually solve difficult problems.

The spokesman said that Wang's comment had clarified the mainland's primary attitude toward solutions to economic and political issues between the two sides.

"If the two sides do not solve those (political and military) disputes or fail to find good solutions, the disputes would probably become a bottleneck even an obstacle in the progress of the cross-Strait relationship," Yang said.

(Xinhua News Agency May 13, 2009)