Tsai Ing-wen

Tsai Ing-wen (born August 31, 1956, Fang-shan township, P’ing-tung county, Taiwan) is an educator and politician who was the first female president of Taiwan (2016–24).

Tsai, who is of Hakka descent, is one of nine children born to a wealthy business family. She spent her early childhood in coastal southern Taiwan before going to Taipei, where she completed her education. She received a law degree (1978) from National Taiwan University in Taipei and then attended Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and the London School of Economics, earning, respectively, master’s (1980) and doctorate (1984) degrees in law. Tsai then returned to Taiwan, where until 2000 she taught law at universities in Taipei.

Tsai became involved in government service in the early 1990s when she was appointed as a trade policy adviser in the administration of Pres. Lee Teng-hui. A significant achievement during that time was her major role in the negotiations that paved the way for Taiwan to join (2002) the World Trade Organization. In 2000, after Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) became president of Taiwan, he appointed Tsai chair of the Mainland Affairs Council. That organization, which was responsible for relations between Taiwan and China, faced significant challenges during Chen’s administration (2000–08) because of the DPP’s resistance to China and because of its advocacy of independence for Taiwan.

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Taiwan: The Tsai Ing-wen presidency

In 2004 Tsai joined the DPP and was elected as a member-at-large to Taiwan’s national legislature. She resigned her seat in early 2006 when she was appointed vice-premier of Taiwan. She remained in that post until May 2007. In 2008, following the DPP’s loss in Taiwan’s presidential election, Tsai was chosen as the first woman president of the party. She successfully rebuilt the DPP after its defeat and was reelected to the post in 2010.

Tsai ran unsuccessfully against Eric Chu of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) for mayor of New Taipei City, and she also lost the 2012 presidential race against incumbent Ma Ying-jeou. Despite those setbacks, Tsai was seen as a respectable and electable candidate. Her popularity only increased during the second Ma administration as the KMT-dominated government became mired in corruption and ineptitude.

Tsai had resigned the DPP leadership in 2012 for her presidential run, but she was reelected party president in 2014. The party again nominated Tsai as its candidate for the 2016 presidential election. Her campaign focused on the poor governing performance of the KMT, that party’s increasingly cordial relations with China, and the continued poor performance of Taiwan’s economy. On January 16, 2016, she soundly defeated Chu, and she was inaugurated on May 20.

In addition to being Taiwan’s first woman president, Tsai became the second person to win the presidency who was not a member of the KMT. In addition, following in the footsteps of Lee Teng-hui, she is the second person with ancestry in one of Taiwan’s ethnic minorities (Hakka) to attain that office. Following her victory, she sought to assure a concerned China that she would maintain cordial relations with the mainland.

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In December 2016 the delicate balance of Taiwan-China relations was disturbed when Tsai placed a telephone call to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who overturned several decades of diplomatic protocol by becoming the first U.S. chief executive to speak with his Taiwanese counterpart since 1979. Their conversation appeared to belie the long-standing absence of formal diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the United States, prompting China to make a formal complaint to the U.S. government. Although Tsai and Trump would later say that their call did not indicate a policy shift, by 2019 the Trump administration had committed to major arms sales to Taiwan that included, tanks, missiles, and jet fighters.

Taiwan’s economy grew slowly under Tsai’s stewardship, but in 2019 it was robust enough to have achieved greater growth than that of regional competitors South Korea and Hong Kong. Still, wage gains were minimal, and wealth inequality grew. Having championed unpopular reforms to Taiwan’s energy and pension policies, Tsai witnessed a considerable drop in her popularity as the 2020 presidential election approached. Her strong commitment to Taiwan’s independence and sovereignty resonated loudly with Taiwanese voters, however, as they watched huge throngs of pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong push back for months against the imposition of increasingly authoritarian rule by Beijing. In the January 2020 election, Tsai won a second term by trouncing her KMT opponent, Han Kuo-yu, who advocated greater engagement with China. When the results were tabulated, some 57 percent of the total vote had gone to Tsai, about 39 percent to Han, and little more than 4 percent to James Soong, the standard-bearer for the People First Party.

Shortly after the election, the COVID-19 global pandemic extended its reach to Taiwan, and Tsai oversaw the government’s aggressive campaign to combat the spread of the disease—which is caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the first cases of which were reported in China in December 2019. By employing stringent border controls, mandatory quarantines, rigorous contact tracing, and mask wearing, Taiwan largely held the virus at bay. However, beginning in May 2021, infection rates briefly spiked as a result of the appearance of the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus, and later the rates climbed significantly higher with the arrival of the Omicron variant. Nevertheless, by June 2022 Taiwan had shifted to a “living with the virus” approach, as more than 80 percent of Taiwanese had been fully vaccinated and more than 60 percent had also received booster shots.

Although the pandemic had wreaked havoc on the economies of many countries, Tsai could boast that the same was not true for Taiwan. As one of the world’s leading producers of semiconductors, Taiwan made the most of the worldwide shift to working at home and the increased need for laptop computers, and its GDP increased by 3 percent in 2020. That increase marked the first time in some three decades that Taiwan’s annual economic growth outstripped that of China.

All the while, China was engaged in an ever-increasing military buildup that seemed to heighten Taiwan’s risk of being invaded. In response, Taiwan increased its own defense spending, but the $17 billion it dedicated to the military in 2022 and the $8.6 billion it planned to spend on defense over the next five years was dwarfed by China’s massive outlay. Military support continued to come from the United States in the form of arms sales, and Joe Biden, the new U.S. president, said more than once that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s aid if the island were attacked by China, though his apparent abandonment of the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity was walked back each time by White House officials, who clarified that U.S. policy regarding Taiwan had not changed.

Tensions in U.S.-China relations were ratcheted up in August 2022 when U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan to meet with Tsai and, she said, to show support for Taiwan’s democracy. China’s government had vehemently warned against Pelosi’s visit to the island, the first by a U.S. elected official of her stature in some 25 years, which China viewed as provocatively enhancing the international status of Taiwan’s government.

Due to term limits, Tsai could not run for president again. She endorsed her vice president, Lai Ching-te, and he won the presidential election held in January 2024.