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.
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