Ma Ying-jeou
Ma Ying-jeou was president of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016, the Harvard law doctor and Kuomintang mayor of Taipei who won the election of March 2008 with fifty-eight per cent after Chen's scandals. He governed eight years of rapprochement with Peking under the 1992 consensus, that there is one China which each side defines for itself. There were the direct flights and shipping opened in 2008 after sixty years, the mainland tourists who came in millions, and the twenty-three agreements with Peking on everything from crime to food safety. There was the trade framework agreement of 2010 that cut the tariffs on the island's exports, and the meeting with Xi Jinping in Singapore on 7 November 2015, the first between the two sides' leaders since 1949, at which they shook hands for eighty seconds and called each other mister. The island's answer was the Sunflower movement of March 2014, when students occupied the legislature for twenty-four days against the services trade pact with China, which was never ratified. There was the election of 2016 that his party lost by twenty-five points, on his approval rating of nine per cent, the economy's stagnant wages, and the fear that he had brought the island too close. He was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a KMT official's family from Hunan that moved to Taiwan the next year, studied law at National Taiwan University, New York University and Harvard, was Chiang Ching-kuo's English secretary and interpreter from 1981, justice minister in 1993-96, who prosecuted the vote-buying his own party lived on until the party removed him. He was mayor of Taipei from 1998 to 2006, the handsome jogger the housewives voted for. The presidency also had the Morakot typhoon of August 2009 that killed six hundred and seventy and his government's slow response. There was the death of a conscript under punishment in 2013 that brought a quarter of a million into the streets and ended court-martial in peacetime. There were the Kuokuang petrochemical plant cancelled, the nuclear plant mothballed, and the fisheries agreement with Japan. He was indicted after leaving office for leaking wiretap information in 2013 and acquitted. He went to the mainland in 2023, the first former president to do so, to honour his ancestors in Hunan, and again in 2024 to meet Xi. The KMT's own candidates kept their distance from that. He has said that the young of Taiwan do not know what war is, and that he does, having been born on the way out of one.
- Lived: 1950 CE – ?
- Nationality: Taiwanese
- Roles: president, politician
