Former vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) appears the most likely candidate to win the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) chairpersonship election in May, according to a survey released yesterday by the Taiwan Public Opinion Studies Association.
The survey was conducted on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25 among 691 of the KMT’s approximately 1,600 party representatives to gauge their perceptions about the six candidates in the race for the party’s top post.
Wu led the other five in all six areas in the poll: political experience (55 percent of respondents), capability of uniting the KMT (48 percent), capability of leading the KMT back to power (48 percent), leadership competency (53 percent), chance of winning the election (43 percent) and support rate (45 percent).
KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) placed second in all six categories, but her support rate was only 21 percent, while KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) came in third in every area and had a 17 percent support rate.
The other three candidates placed far behind, with Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corp president Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) earning just a 2 percent support rate and former KMT vice chairman Steve Chan (詹啟賢) and former KMT legislator Pan Wei-kang (潘維剛) each receiving 1 percent.
Former KMT lawmaker Chen Ken-te (陳根德) said the poll results showed that the campaign for the May 20 election is closely related to the candidates’ cross-strait policies.
“One of them supports the framework of ‘one China, same interpretation’ ... and proposed ‘seeking agreement on the one China principle, while shelving the different interpretations of one China’ when meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last year, which I believe runs counter to mainstream public opinion,” Chen said, referring to Hung.
Wu’s support of the “one China, with different interpretations” framework, which has been welcomed by the majority of Taiwanese appears to have led to his higher support rate in the survey, Chen said.
The survey had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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