Lee Teng-hui
Lee Teng-hui was president of the Republic of China on Taiwan from 1988 to 2000, the first born on the island, the first Taiwanese rather than mainlander to hold the office, and, in March 1996, the first president elected by the people, with fifty-four per cent, while China fired missiles into the sea off Keelung and Kaohsiung to frighten the voters and the United States sent two carrier groups through the strait. The agricultural economist whom Chiang Ching-kuo had made vice-president in 1984 finished what Chiang had begun, retiring the mainland legislators elected in 1947 who had sat for forty-four years. He ended the temporary provisions of the civil war in 1991, holding the first full elections to the legislature in 1992. He apologised in 1995 for the massacre of 28 February 1947, and said in 1999 that Taiwan and China had special state-to-state relations, which Peking has not forgiven. He was born near Taipei in 1923 under Japanese rule, was educated in Japanese as Iwasato Masao and served in the Japanese army's anti-aircraft artillery in 1944-45, studied agricultural economics at Kyoto, at National Taiwan University, at Iowa State and at Cornell, where his doctorate on Taiwan's intersectoral capital flows won a prize. He was briefly a Communist in 1946-47, which the Kuomintang knew and forgave. Chiang Ching-kuo brought him into the cabinet in 1972 as the Taiwanese face the party needed, made him mayor of Taipei in 1978 and governor of Taiwan province in 1981. He chose him as vice-president over the mainlanders' objections. He took the presidency on Chiang's death in January 1988 as a caretaker the old guard expected to control, and outlasted them one by one. He used the Taiwanese faction and the opposition against the mainlanders, and the National Affairs Conference of 1990 to set the reforms in train. The Kuomintang lost the presidency in 2000 to Chen Shui-bian, partly because Lee had split the party's vote. It expelled him the next year when he founded the Taiwan Solidarity Union. He spent his last twenty years as the elder of Taiwanese independence, a Presbyterian and a reader of Goethe, and died in Taipei in July 2020 at ninety-seven.
- Lived: 1923 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Taiwanese
- Roles: president, politician
