TAIPEI: Around one million people in Taiwan have had extramarital affairs, according to the results of a poll released by the Millennium Cultural and Educational Foundation (MCEF) Monday.

The survey on the state of Taiwanese families found that 3.3 percent of respondents confessed to having extramarital affairs and 5.8 percent said their spouses had had affairs with others - which translates into 1 million people among a total population of 23 million.

MCEF research department chief Hu Cheng-wen said 500,000 families of Taiwan have been negatively affected as a result of extramarital affairs, leading children to develop an incorrect view of marriage.

The survey also found that 34 percent of those polled said they could have children even without being married, while 16.8 percent saw marriage as a "fixed-term" contract rather than a "lifelong" one - a situation Hu interpreted as the result of rising feminism and changes in the traditional concepts of having children in families.

Hu said that as the numbers of both unmarried women with strong education backgrounds and unmarried men with low education levels are increasing, a marriage imbalance will continue.

The survey was conducted between December 24, 2009 and January 8 among adults 20 years or older, with 1,076 valid responses collected.

The poll has a confidence interval of 95 percent and margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

China Daily/CNA

(HK Edition 02/03/2010 page2)