Poll: Hong Kong people increasingly like Taiwan

The following is my speech today as a commentator for the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Project. Today's survey release focuses on:

1. Carrie Lam is expected to drop to a record low;
2. Hong Kong people's favorable impression of Xi Jinping has fallen sharply, while Tsai Ing-wen has risen sharply. Now Tsai Ing-wen is higher than Xi Jinping;
3. Hong Kong people are more and more fond of Taiwan.

I am in charge of the comments for part 3. For other content and detailed data, you can read the press release of the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute.

First of all, I would like to thank the Hong Kong Minyan Research Institute for inviting me to comment here today, and I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Hong Kong Minyan Research Institute for its contributions to Hong Kong. In the past few years, I have started to do some popularization work on data literacy, and many of these cases are based on the figures of the Hong Kong Civil Research Institute. Simply put, without you, there would be no me.

I would also like to point out the importance of this to the journalists present. The importance of Hong Kong civilian research does not exist independently, but is interlinked with the research of many Hong Kong scholars. Therefore, to understand the data of Hong Kong's private research, we must also look at the research of these scholars, which can make these data more meaningful. Today I was invited to discuss the data on the part of "Hong Kong people's perceptions of people and governments in different places", and I just did a qualitative research on the same topic a few years ago. Social science research often talks about the combination of quantitative and homogeneous research, and I hope I can help you to have a deeper understanding of these data today.

This survey took place during the "Reverse Extradition" movement, and I can see from the data that Hong Kong people's favorability towards Taiwan and the Taiwanese government has increased significantly compared to a year ago. I think we can reasonably suspect that there is some connection between the two.

Let's look at the overall data first. The horizontal axis of this graph is the perception of the people, the vertical axis is the perception of the government, and the point in the middle is zero. My drawing method can easily divide the picture into four parts: the upper left corner is favorable to the government and the people are disgusted, and no country or region is here; the upper right corner is favorable to the government and the people, most countries and regions are here, the right The bottom corner is disgust with the government, the people are good, the United States and Hong Kong are here; the last is the bottom left corner: disgust with both the government and the people: only the mainland falls into this category.

First of all, I would like to point out that what we see is the perception of Hong Kong people, and it does not necessarily represent whether the local government or the people themselves are worthy of favor or dislike; and according to my past research, Hong Kong people’s knowledge and interest in places outside Hong Kong are not very large. I have personally interviewed many Hong Kong people about their views on different places outside Hong Kong. What they said the most was their personal experience of traveling to Taiwan and Japan, which I believe also reflects why they have a higher favorable impression of Japan and the people of Taiwan.

Regarding the government, Hong Kong people have the highest favorable impression of the German government. I don't have a good explanation. I have wondered if it has something to do with the popularity of the German consulate’s social media comments, which is what we call “German dehumidifiers” online, but from the data, Hong Kong people have always had a relatively high degree of favorability towards the German government, not only recently thing.

Speaking of changes, let's take a look at the data changes in the past year. The first and most obvious finding is that there has been an obvious two-way shift in Hong Kong people's views of Hong Kong people themselves and the Hong Kong government: the favorable impression of Hong Kong people has increased significantly, and the dislike of the Hong Kong government has increased significantly. A place can form a strong cohesion on the one hand, and at the same time be so dissatisfied with the government, I think it obviously means that there is a big problem in this place.

Elsewhere, we have seen similar situations in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States: the favorable impression of the local people and the government has increased significantly. As mentioned just now, this investigation happened during the "anti-extradition" movement, and during this time, foreign governments and public opinion representatives expressed their support for Hong Kong. The Taiwan side is very obvious, and President Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly expressed concern about the situation in Hong Kong. In the United States, representatives of Congress and the government also expressed their views. In Japan, during the G20 period, the Japanese Prime Minister expressed his concern to Xi Jinping about the situation in Hong Kong, and many Japanese media continued to report on the situation in Hong Kong. Whether these foreign countries' attention to Hong Kong will in turn increase Hong Kong people's goodwill towards these places deserves further investigation. Before the G20, there was a series of overseas tandem events, and these feelings of global solidarity may also strengthen Hong Kong people's goodwill towards the outside world.

If we take the situation of Hong Kong, the mainland, and Taiwan out and look at it, we will find an interesting phenomenon, that is, these three sets of data have moved in three directions in the past two years. For Taiwan, Hong Kong people are more and more fond of the Taiwanese government and people; for Hong Kong, they are more and more fond of Hong Kong people, and they are more and more disgusted with the Hong Kong government; more disgusted. I think the direction of these three lines reflects how Hong Kong people understand the current situation in Hong Kong: we wish Taiwan's future, worry about the current situation of Hong Kong, and do not want to become mainland China one day.

That's it for my sharing today. thank you all.