Harsh criticism of and strong opposition to Taiwan's planned UN referendum by US officials recently could stir up even more anti-US sentiment in Taiwan, academics said in a seminar yesterday.
"Recent public opinion polls show that US popularity in Taiwan has been decreasing as the latter has been leaning toward China in handling the Taiwan Strait issue," said Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政), a professor of politics at Soochow University, during a seminar organized by the pro-independence Taiwan Thinktank.
"The Americans should pay close attention to this," Lo said, because anti-US sentiment was almost non-existent during the past decades in Taiwan. If the sentiment develops into anti-Americanism, we will probably see a fundamental and structural change in Taiwan-US relations in future, he said.
Tung Li-wen (董立文), deputy executive at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, agreed that the intensity of anti-US sentiment is unprecedented, saying it resulted from the US "actually helping China change the status quo and pressuring Taiwan to kowtow to China."
"The worst-case scenario would be that Taiwan becomes not only an anti-communist country but also anti-US at the same time," Tung said.
Most Taiwanese have the impression that the US has been putting much more pressure on Taiwan than on China by failing to ask it to remove its missiles, improve human rights and stop squeezing Taiwan's international space, Lo said.
People have the impression that Taiwan's democracy, which the US had called for since the end of World War II, was not enough to give it the recognition it deserves internationally, said Chen Wen-hsien (陳文賢), a professor at National Chengchi University.
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