• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Over 40 percent of Taiwanese support peace pact with China

ROC Central News Agency

2013/05/09 21:59:10

Taipei, May 9 (CNA) A new poll has found that 44.9 percent of Taiwanese support the idea of signing a peace agreement with mainland China -- for the sake of maintaining current exchanges across the Taiwan Strait and ensuring that peaceful development of bilateral ties will continue.

The poll, commissioned by the Taiwan Competitiveness Forum, also found that 55.9 percent of those surveyed believe that President Ma Ying-jeou's 'no unification, no independence and no use of arms' policy toward China could go on forever, as 45.6 percent said maintaining the status quo across the strait would be in Taiwan's best interest.

While nearly half of the Taiwanese support a peace agreement with China, over a third -- 36.9 percent -- oppose signing it at this point in time, according to the poll.

Taiwan and China are technically at war 64 years after the Republic of China's ruling Kuomintang lost a civil war to the Communist Party of China and fled to Taiwan. A peace pact is therefore called for if the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are to develop a 'normal' relationship.

The poll results show that 57.5 percent of the Taiwanese public say they are Chinese, while 37.6 percent deny they are Chinese -- up from 35.4 percent in the first quarter.

The poll further found that 60.9 percent of the people here who call themselves Taiwanese have no problems referring to themselves as Chinese when they visit or live in China.

'This is understandable because we have to face reality -- and be realistic,' these people told pollsters.

However, a little over a quarter of the Taiwanese polled -- 25.2 percent -- say such an 'unprincipled' sense of identity should be criticized, according to the poll.

Over 1 million Taiwanese live in China as business investors, executives of Taiwanese-invested companies or their dependents. In 2012, Taiwanese people made 5.34 million visits to China.

The Taiwan Competitiveness Forum commissioned a private company to conduct the telephone survey from April 23-24 on adults from all over Taiwan.

The poll gathered 1,077 valid samples. It has a confidence level of 95 percent, with a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

(By Chen Shun-hsieh and S.C. Chang)
Enditem/cs