The majority of Taiwanese are willing to fight if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) attacks Taiwan, according to a poll released on August 10 by the Taiwan New Constitution Foundation (台灣制憲基金會).
The poll found that over 64% of respondents are willing to go to war if the PRC attacks Taiwan. 36% said they “definitely would” and 23% said they “probably would”, while 16.2% and 12.1% respectively said that they “probably would not” and “definitely would not”. 7.4% expressed no opinion.
67.9% of respondents said they consider themselves Taiwanese, while 27.8% think of themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese. Only 1.8% said they view themselves as Chinese. When given the choice between Chinese or Taiwanese nationality exclusively, 89.9% opted for the latter.
Maintaining the status quo with the PRC was favoured by 50.1%, of respondents, independence was favoured by 39.9%, and 4.7% said they support unification with China.
The survey found that 65.1% of respondents refer to Taiwan’s Olympic team as the “Taiwan team”, while 25.7% use the official name “Chinese Taipei” (中華隊).
83.9% said they had a positive view of Japan, and 75.6% had a positive view of the United States. Nearly 90% supported establishing diplomatic ties with the two countries. 70.3% had a negative view of China, while only 16.4% expressed a positive opinion.
The Taiwan New Constitution Foundation was founded by Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏), a long-time Taiwan independence activist and former senior advisor to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration.
Koo was born in 1926 under Japanese colonial rule. His father was a wealthy businessman who supported the Japanese authorities. Koo fled to Japan after the 228 massacre of 1947 and became an independence activist.
At the press conference announcing the poll, Koo said that he hoped Taiwan would become a “normal country” (台灣成為正常國家), that it should drop the name “Republic of China” (中華民國) and be called “Republic of Taiwan” (台灣共和國).
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