TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The number of Taiwanese people who prefer to maintain the cross-strait status quo indefinitely has increased for a fourth year, according to a study that also surveys how people in Taiwan describe their nationality.
Results of the annual National Chengchi University (NCCU) study were released on Friday (Feb. 23) and showed 33.2% of people preferred to “maintain the status quo indefinitely,” a number which has steadily increased from 2020 when it was 25.5%. Meanwhile, 25.8% preferred to “maintain the status quo, move toward independence,” a number that has been declining since 2020.
The number of people who expressed a preference for “independence as soon as possible” likewise continued to drop and is now at just under 4%. Those who expressed a preference for the option “maintain the status quo, move toward unification (with China)” remained steady at around 6%.
Meanwhile, the survey showed the number of people who identify as “Taiwanese” (61.7%) continuing on a downward trend as the number of those who identify as “both Taiwanese and Chinese” (32%) rose slightly. Those who identify as “Chinese” fell marginally to 2.4%, a record low since the study began, and 6.6 points lower than when the study was first taken in 1992.
(National Chengchi University Election Studies Center data)
Assistant professor of political science at Soochow University Fang-Yu Chen (陳方隅) told Taiwan News that the results were unsurprising. On cross-strait relations, Chen said, “For most people, the status quo is independence.”
He said this holds true for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters too, a party which is more commonly associated with Taiwan independence. “Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) or Lai Ching-te (賴清德) both stress the importance of the idea that we are already independent.”
“So, maintaining the status quo for some people is, maybe, equal to maintaining independence indefinitely,” Chen said.
Chen also noted that the poll was taken in an election year, and said it is “quite normal” for people to express a preference for the status-quo at this time as it is uncontroversial, and will not anger the Chinese government.
The number of people who identify as both “Taiwanese and Chinese” corresponds roughly to the number of those who voted for the Kuomintang’s (KMT) presidential candidate in the January election. Chen said this point reflects the need for more qualitative studies on Taiwanese people’s identity, to explain why people respond the way they do.
(National Chengchi University Election Studies Center data)
“But, for a very quick way, (the NCCU study) is still a good way to understand the changes or the dynamics of identity,” he said.
The poll surveyed just under 15,000 people throughout Taiwan, excluding the outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu. The study used landline and cellphone questionnaires to ask people over the age of 20 to respond to questions from a select set of answers.
