More than 50 percent of military personnel believe there is going to be war between Taiwan and China -- numbers the Ministry of National Defense's General Political Warfare Bureau said yesterday were a good sign.
"It shows that most of our personnel have not forgotten they face an enemy that needs to be dealt with. They would be ready for combat on the shortest possible notice," said Lieutenant General Chen Kuo-hsiang (陳國祥), director-general of the bureau.
Chen made his remarks during a meeting at the legislature's National Defense Committee yesterday morning.
Unveiling the results of a survey conducted earlier this year, the bureau said that 50.3 percent of military personnel who participated in the annual Han Kuang military exercise believed there will be a war between Taiwan and China sometime in the near future.
Chen said the questionnaire was given to 3,010 soldiers who participated in the exercise following an "intensive mental training course."
He refused to give any details about the course.
"I can only say that based on the results, we have achieved what we set out to do," Chen said.
"Reminding our soldiers of the existing threat and making sure everything is on track is in line with our goals. Obviously, the exercise and training were a success," he said.
In addition to believing that war was imminent, 85.6 percent of respondents said they were always conscious of the possibility of information leaks or Chinese espionage occurring while they were on duty.
Chen said the course was designed to help soldiers realize that Beijing is relentless in its military threat against Taiwan.
"In addition to the constant reminder, the results also showed that 85.7 percent of our military personnel would do whatever it takes to perform their jobs under any circumstances," Chen said.
This is a good sign," he said.
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Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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