Chen Shui-bian
Chen Shui-bian was president of Taiwan from 2000 to 2008, the first from the Democratic Progressive Party and the first not of the Kuomintang, elected in March 2000 with thirty-nine per cent when the KMT split its vote between two candidates, the son of a tenant farmer from Tainan who had been the defence lawyer of the Kaohsiung Eight in 1980, the dissidents tried by military court after the human rights day rally, which was where his politics began. He governed eight years of a divided state, with the KMT holding the legislature throughout, Peking refusing to speak to him, and Washington, after 2003, telling him to stop. There was the referendum of 2004 on the Chinese missiles held alongside his re-election, which he won by thirty thousand votes the day after two bullets grazed him and his running mate at a rally in Tainan, a shooting the KMT said was staged. There was the abolition of the National Unification Council in 2006, and the campaign for UN membership under the name Taiwan in 2007. There was the desinicisation of the textbooks and the state companies' names, and the growth that shifted the factories to the mainland while he said the mainland was the enemy. He was born in Kuantien in 1950, took the top score in the country in the law examination while still at National Taiwan University, was a maritime lawyer. He became a politician when the Kaohsiung trial taught him what the courts were. He was jailed for eight months in 1986 for libel of a KMT figure. His wife Wu Shu-chen was paralysed in 1985 when a truck ran her down after a campaign, which the family has always called an attempt on her. He was a Taipei city councillor, a legislator, and mayor of Taipei from 1994 to 1998, when he cleaned up the city's traffic and its brothels and lost to Ma Ying-jeou. The presidency ended in the courts. There were the state affairs fund, the receipts his wife had submitted for the family's expenses, the money in Swiss accounts that his son and daughter-in-law had moved, and the developers' payments. He was arrested in November 2008 in handcuffs raised above his head for the cameras. He was convicted of corruption and money laundering in 2009 and sentenced to life, reduced to twenty years. He served six in Taipei prison before a medical parole in January 2015 for the depression and the tremor the prison doctors had documented. The government of his own party has renewed every three months since. He lives in Kaohsiung under the parole's conditions, which he tests. He remains the man half the island thinks was framed for being Taiwanese and the other half thinks stole, which is the island's politics in one biography.
- Lived: 1950 CE – ?
- Nationality: Taiwanese
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
