It seems almost superfluous to say so, but the President is deeply unpopular. FocusTaiwan says....
President Ma Ying-jeou's approval rating has fallen to 21 percent from 23 percent a year ago, according to a United Daily News poll conducted as Ma nears the end of the first year of his second term in office. He was sworn in on May 20, 2012.UDN is rabidly pro-KMT. Taiwan Thinktank had similar but slightly lower numbers out the other day. Both pan-Blue and pan-Green polling organizations are getting similar numbers. According to the UDN poll Ma's strong suit is foreign policy and his weakness is the economy.
Disapproval of Ma's performance rose from 66 percent to 70 percent during the same period, the poll results showed.
Although the government continues to trumpet the economy as its top priority, its efforts have been found lacking, with 76.4 percent of respondents saying they were not satisfied with the current economic situation in Taiwan.
Mustn't read much into this. Next year's local elections will be contested on local issues with some influence from Ma's low numbers. Ma and the KMT will again have the strong support of the monied classes since no serious progress has been made on Taiwan's wealth gap, income inequality, or tax unfairness. But slumping domestic numbers go a long way to explain why Ma has come on "tough" against the Philippines in incident of the dead fisherman.
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Daily Links:
- Social innovation: lessons from Taiwan, SK, and Singapore.
- US detective has culture shock on trip to Taiwan
- Taiwan tries to regain lead in consumer electronics
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1 comment:
The article on the detective who visited Taiwan says that Taiwan has strict gun laws and then immediately moves to the lower murder rate in Taiwan - perhaps subtly trying to draw a link between the two.
Perhaps it also has to do with the style of policing in Taiwan especially during the martial law era. If the crime was petty and could be hidden, ignored, and unreported, then it was. Motorcycle thefts were common. Sexual crimes could go unreported. But murder? Bank robbery? Those were obvious and were generally solved (or at least someone went to jail whether it was the real culprit or not - the affect on the public was the same).
I wonder what the murder rate among Taiwanese expats in America is. I suspect it is very low. I know the violent crime rate for people of asian ancestry in America is pretty low.
Perhaps what makes the crime rate in Taiwan so low is not the lack of gun, but simply the fact that Taiwan is populated by Taiwanese.
I remember back when Bush the Younger was running for President it was pointed out that educational scores in Texas were lower than in some liberal state up north (can't remember which one). Then someone noticed the following when making the comparison. People of Asian ancestry in Texas were doing better than similar people in the other state. Whites in Texas were doing better than whites in the other state. Blacks in Texas were doing better than blacks in the other state. And hispanics were doing better than hispanics in the other state. But blacks and hispanics in both states were doing worse than whites and people with Asian ancestry. The reason Texas was doing worse overall was that it had a much higher proportion blacks and hispanics.
Whether this is a result of race, culture, discrimination, whatever is something to be discussed, but it does show that you can't compare statistics of different places without consider who lives in those places.
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