Despite strong criticism from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), more than 70 percent of Taiwanese approve of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) identifying herself as the “president of Taiwan” during her first overseas state visit, according to a survey released yesterday by the Taiwan Thinktank.
The telephone-based poll, conducted on Thursday and Friday, showed that 72.4 percent of respondents supported Tsai’s description of herself as “President of Taiwan (ROC) [Republic of China]” in a message she left in a guest book after touring sluice gates of the expanded Panama Canal on June 26, compared with 19.4 percent who thought otherwise.
A further breakdown of the data found that a high percentage — between 84 percent and 85 percent — of adults in the 20-39 age group were in favor of Tsai’s reference to herself as “president of Taiwan” rather than as “president of the ROC.”
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
However, when asked whether Tsai should refer to herself as “president of Taiwan” or use the nation’s official title in future overseas visits, 44.7 percent of those polled opted for the latter, while 39.8 percent preferred the former.
“An analysis of the responses to the two questions indicated that most Taiwanese identify with both Taiwan and the ROC, but those who do not recognize Taiwan are relatively insistent on the president using the term ‘ROC,’” Taiwan Thinktank consultant Chou Yung-hong (周永鴻) told a news conference in Taipei.
Chou said that political affiliation seemed to play a significant factor in respondents’ preferred title for the president, with 65.4 percent of those polled who identified with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) favoring “president of Taiwan” and 77.4 percent of KMT-leaning respondents choosing “president of the ROC.”
Tsai on Saturday concluded her nine-day trip, during which she visited Panama and Paraguay, two of the nation’s diplomatic allies in Latin America, and made transit stops in Miami and Los Angeles.
Tsai’s identification of herself as “president of Taiwan” has been lambasted by the KMT as an act that belittled the nation, but the president said there was no need for a political interpretation of what she wrote.
Regarding some lawmakers’ calls for transitional justice for indigenous people to take precedence over the handling of the KMT’s alleged illicit assets, 48.5 percent of those polled disapproved of the proposal, while 33.7 percent supported the idea.
DPP Legislator Tsai Yi-yu (蔡易餘) said the poll suggested that even Aborigines agree that it is inappropriate to integrate the pursuit of transitional justice for their forebears with the issue of controversial KMT assets.
“As many as 61.9 percent of respondents living in Yilan, Hualien and Taitung counties, which have high concentrations of Aborigines, believed the two issues should be separated,” Tsai Yi-yu said.
The poll collected 1,246 valid samples and had a confidence level of 95 percent, with a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.
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