Public opinion is divided on a meeting between Taiwan’s and China’s presidents and how Taiwan should react if the US reduces its arms sales, a poll showed yesterday.
Taiwan Indicator Survey Research (TISR) said 37.9 percent of respondents said Taiwan should buy fewer weapons from the US if China pledges to abandon the use of force against Taiwan.
However, almost half (48.3 percent) said Taiwan should not reduce its arms procurement, while 13.7 percent declined to answer.
The poll was conducted shortly after media reports said Beijing’s had proposed establishing an institutionalized dialogue with Washington about US arms sales to Taiwan, which the US later denied.
Opinion on arms sales seemed to be split as well, with 44.5 percent of respondents saying they hoped Taiwan could purchase better weapons systems to boost its military confidence against China’s modernized military capability, while 39.6 percent said advanced weaponry would be not be necessary since cross-strait tensions have been dramatically reduced.
TISR said public opinion on arms procurement is more divided than in April 2009, when a similar poll was conducted.
However, the majority of the respondents (63 percent) remain supportive of the “status quo,” even if Washington reduces its arms sales, with 19 percent saying that Taiwan should expedite the independence movement process and 3.2 percent favoring accelerated unification.
On the possibility of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) meeting, which Ma mentioned last week, 43.2 percent of respondents support such a meeting before Ma leaves office in 2016, while 36 percent do not support it and 20.6 percent did not respond.
The support rating has dropped compared with a poll in May 2010, when 51.5 percent of respondents said they supported a meeting between Ma and then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤).
A question on what would be the best location for such a meeting, with respondents allowed to make more than on choice, Taiwan was named by 52.3 percent as the bestn, followed by a third country (42.2 percent), the median line of the Taiwan Strait (32.2 percent), Kinmen or Matsu (27.2 percent) and China (25.3 percent).
A multiple choice question on the titles to be used for such a meeting found 72 percent of the respondents favored “Republic of China president and the People’s Republic of China [PRC] president.”
The second most popular choice (57.4 percent) was “leader of the Taiwan region and leader of mainland China region,” followed by “Chinese Nationalist Party chairman and Chinese Communist Party general-secretary” (42.1 percent).
Other possible options were Ma and Xi meeting as leaders of APEC members — Chinese Taipei and the PRC (39.2 percent), while 33.7 percent said they should meet as leaders under the titles used in the WTO.
The survey was conducted on Monday and Tuesday and collected 1,002 valid samples. It had a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
RSS