President held firm against Beijing
Lee Teng-hui, the former president of Taiwan (a.k.a. the Republic of China), who has died aged 97, was his country’s first leader to be elected by popular vote; but his insistence that Taiwan be regarded as a sovereign state led Beijing to damn him “for 1,000 generations” and call him a “whore.”
As president from 1988 to 2000, Lee presided over his country’s transformation from one chiefly associated with cheap plastic toys and cut-price computers to one of Asia’s most prosperous democracies.
Yet his insistence that Taiwan be treated as an independent state posed a political quandary for western nations seeking to improve relations with Beijing, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province and insisted on Lee being treated as an international pariah. Taiwan has formal diplomatic relations with only 14 UN member states, not including the U.S. or the U.K., both of which recognize Beijing as the sole government of China.
Lee Teng-hui was born on Jan. 15, 1923, in Sanchih, a village on the outskirts of Taipei, when the island was under Japanese rule; he never set foot on the mainland. He became a beneficiary of efforts of the Japanese empire to co-opt local elites in its colonies; in his high school class, he was one of only four Taiwanese students.
He sat out the Second World War at Kyoto Imperial University in Japan, returning to study at the National Taiwan University in 1945, during the period of reunification with mainland China which ended in 1949.
Lee joined the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) in 1971 and was made a cabinet minister responsible for agriculture. In 1984 President Chiang Ching-kuo appointed him his vice-president.
Lee was widely credited with the agricultural reforms which yielded surpluses that created the basis for the spectacular industrial growth of the 1980s.
When Chiang died in 1988, Lee was sworn in as his constitutional successor.
Lee outmanoeuvred the more conservative elements in the KMT and pressed on with democratization, reducing the concentration of government authority in the hands of mainland Chinese.
Until the 1990s the president had been chosen by deputies of the National Assembly. In 1996, however, Lee was re-elected in the first direct presidential election in Taiwanese history.