A poll of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members showed that a majority favored limiting terms of members of a key committee and electing younger people to reform the party, the KMT said yesterday.
The KMT released the results of the poll ahead of its national congress, which is to be held at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei on Sunday.
The main theme of the congress is “Protect Taiwan, safeguard democracy and fight for the future,” KMT spokeswoman Hung Yu-chien (洪于茜) told a news conference at the party’s headquarters in Taipei.
Photo: CNA
As part of its efforts to reform the party, KMT Culture and Communications Committee chairwoman Alicia Wang (王育敏) said the KMT commissioned the TVBS Poll Center to conduct a survey on the topic among party members.
The survey showed that 60.2 percent of KMT members support limiting the term of members of the Central Standing Committee to one consecutive term, with a maximum term of eight years.
It also found that 82.8 percent of party members agreed that more than half of Central Committee and Central Standing Committee members should be young, female, from overseas or disadvantaged people, or elected representatives or officials.
Nearly 86 percent of KMT members support the idea of having one in every five KMT nominees for legislator-at-large seats be younger than 40 with professional knowledge, the poll showed.
Almost 82 percent of KMT members support promoting cross-strait exchanges and dialogue on the basis of a “1992 consensus based on the Republic of China Constitution,” according to the poll.
The poll also asked KMT members if they support KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang’s (江啟臣) proposition that “the core value of the KMT is the Republic of China.”
Nearly 94 percent of respondents said that they support it, the survey found.
The poll was conducted from Thursday to Saturday last week, and collected 1,130 valid samples, the KMT said.
It had a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points, it added.
There are about 340,000 KMT members, Wang said.
Earlier yesterday at the KMT’s weekly Central Standing Committee meeting, Chiang announced that on the day of the national congress, the KMT would launch a referendum on food safety, in response to the Democratic Progressive Party administration’s decision to ease restrictions on imports of US pork containing ractopamine and beef.
Chiang is to deliver a report on party reform at the national congress, the KMT said.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A magnitude 5.7 earthquake yesterday struck off the coast of Hualien, causing brief transportation disruptions in northern and eastern Taiwan, as authorities said that aftershocks of magnitude 5 or higher could occur over the next three days. The quake, which hit at 7:24pm at a depth of 24.5km, registered an intensity of 4 in Hualien and Nantou counties, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. In Taipei, the MRT railway’s operations control center received an earthquake alert and initiated standard safety procedures, briefly halting trains on the Bannan (blue) line for about a minute.
RSS