Public approval of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) performance has dropped to the lowest level since she took office on May 20, while that of Premier Lin Chuan (林全) remains below 30 percent, according to a survey released yesterday.
Tsai’s performance received an approval rating of 37.6 percent in the Taiwan Indicators Survey Research (TISR) survey, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, down by 0.8 percentage points from the previous survey.
The dissatisfaction rating reached 46.4 percent, an improvement from 48.3 percent in a previous poll, the survey showed.
The satisfaction rating was the lowest to date and compared with a 54.6 percent rating by the private survey company conducted in late June.
As for Lin, 28.7 percent of respondents said they are satisfied with the premier’s performance, up from 28 percent in the previous poll, while 48 percent said they are not satisfied, down from 53 percent.
Asked about the poll’s results, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said that “there are different public polls, but we will still take them all as references.”
The government will do its utmost to promote reforms to meet the high expectations of society, Huang said.
Since May 20, TISR has conducted surveys on the performance of the new government every six weeks through telephone interviews.
In the latest poll, 1,005 randomly selected people aged 20 or older were interviewed.
The survey has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.
Taiwan might be China’s next target after it has “walled off” Hong Kong from the rest of the world with its new national security legislation, Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology fellow Wu Jieh-min (吳介民) said on Thursday. At a seminar organized by the Economic Democracy Union, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the Hong Kong Outlanders and the Judicial Reform Foundation, Wu said that the legislation is simultaneously a fig leaf concealing Beijing’s autocratic rule in Hong Kong and a figurative “Berlin Wall,” denying democratic countries access to Hong Kong. Wu said it is evident that Taiwan would be China’s next target. The
YOUNGEST PATIENT: Cases of botulism have been only sporadically reported over the past few years, with two in 2015, six in 2016 and none in the past three years The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the nation’s first case of infant botulism this year, a four-month-old boy in northern Taiwan, as well as five new cases of Japanese encephalitis confirmed last week. The boy was introduced to homemade solid food in the middle of last month, but began to experience constipation and loss of appetite on June 23, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Guo Hung-wei (郭宏偉) said, adding that he was taken to the hospital when he developed a fever and shortness of breath on June 25. In the hospital, the boy also experienced a rapid heartbeat, limb
The National Taiwan Museum’s Railway Department Park in Taipei is to open to the public today. The park in Datong District (大同) near the North Gate (北門, Beimen) is one of the museum’s four branches. During the Japanese colonial era, the site housed the railway department of the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan’s Bureau of Transportation. After World War II, it served as the headquarters for the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) for several decades. In 2007, it was listed as a national monument under the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act (文化資產保存法). At an opening ceremony yesterday, Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung
CHALLENGER DEEP: Lin Ying-Tsong was invited by Caladan Oceanic founder Victor Vescovo to join him on a 10-hour long trip in the company’s submersible Taiwanese-American Lin Ying-Tsong (林穎聰) last month became the first person from Asia and the 12th in human history to dive into the deepest part on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. Lin, 45, an expert in deep sea acoustics with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, joined US adventurer and Caladan Oceanic founder Victor Vescovo, 54, on June 22 in a descent to the central pool of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the trench, which lies at a depth of more than 10,900m. The pair made the descent in a submersible named Limiting Factor, a US$37
RSS