Half of Taiwanese support independence, according to the results of a poll released yesterday by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, which also found that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) support rating fell by 7 percentage points.
Fifty percent of respondents supported independence, 25.7 percent supported maintaining the “status quo” and 11.8 percent supported unification, while 12.1 percent had no opinion, did not know or refused to answer, the foundation said.
Support for independence is the new mainstream opinion, regardless of which party is in power, foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said.
Photo: Tien Su-hua, Taipei Times
Insinuations that Taiwan wants to maintain the “status quo” are a fabrication that could severely mislead the international community, he added.
Fifty-three percent of respondents welcomed US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, while 24 percent did not and 23 percent had no opinion.
The poll found that 55.2 percent think Chinese military exercises would decrease the willingness of Taiwanese to unify with China, 17.5 percent said they would reinforce such feelings and 8.1 percent said they would have no effect, while 12 percent had no opinion and 7.2 percent did not know.
Asked about the likelihood that China might attack Taiwan, about 36 percent said an invasion was highly improbable, 26.7 percent said there was some possibility, 16.7 percent said it was impossible, 12.3 percent said it was highly possible and 8.4 percent had no opinion.
Compared with last month, support for Tsai’s performance dropped by 7 percentage points to 45.7 percent. Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with her performance increased by 5.6 percentage points to 40.7 percent.
It is highly unusual for the support rating to drop so dramatically, especially given Pelosi’s visit and Chinese military drills, as presidents usually enjoy a boost in popular support when facing external pressures, You said.
The most probable explanation is internal politics, namely dissatisfaction with Tsai’s security leadership and a plagiarism scandal involving former Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅), he said.
Former Democratic Progressive Party legislator Lin Cho-shui (林濁水) said the Tsai administration’s response to China’s military exercises was weak and slow, as Taiwanese learned that Beijing had fired ballistic missiles over Taiwan from Japanese reports and not from the government.
The poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday last week, polled people aged 20 or older by telephone. It collected 1,035 valid samples, with a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 3.05 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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching