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Tsai Ing-wen
Also Known As Tsai
President of the Republic of China
Tsai Ing-wen is a Taiwanese politician who has served as the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 2016. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Tsai is the first female president of Taiwan. She served as chair of the DPP from 2020 to 2022, and also previously from 2008 to 2012 and 2014 to 2018.
Tsai grew up in Taipei and studied law and international trade, and later became a law professor at Soochow University School of Law and National Chengchi University after earning an LLB from National Taiwan University and an LLM from Cornell Law School. She later studied law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with her thesis titled "Unfair trade practices and safeguard actions", and was awarded a Ph.D. in law from the University of London. In 1993, as an independent (without party affiliation), she was appointed to a series of governmental positions, including trade negotiator for WTO affairs, by the then ruling party Kuomintang (KMT) and was one of the chief drafters of the special state-to-state relations doctrine under the President Lee Teng-hui.
During the first term of Chen Shui-bian's presidency, Tsai served as Minister of the Mainland Affairs Council. She joined the DPP in 2004 and served briefly as a DPP-nominated at-large member of the Legislative Yuan, and was then appointed as Vice Premier under Premier Su Tseng-chang until the cabinet's mass resignation in 2007. Following the DPP's defeat in the presidential election in 2008, she was elected as party chair of the DPP, but she resigned when the party lost the presidential election in 2012.
Tsai ran for New Taipei City mayorship in the 2010 municipal elections but was defeated by the KMT candidate, Eric Chu. In April 2011, Tsai became the first female nominated by a major party as a presidential candidate in the history of Taiwan after defeating her former superior, Su Tseng-chang, in the DPP's primary by a slight margin. In the fifth presidential election in 2012, she was defeated by the then-president Ma Ying-jeou, but she won her first term of presidency in the 2016 presidential election by a landslide in a rematch against Chu. In the 2020 election, she was re-elected as president with an increased share of the vote. Tsai is the second president from the Democratic Progressive Party, and the first popularly elected president to have never served as Mayor of Taipei.
Tsai was named one of Time's most influential people of 2020 and was #9 on Forbes's most powerful women and #2 female politician after Kamala Harris of 2021. Internationally, Tsai has been praised for her response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for standing up to pressure from the Government of the People's Republic of China. Tsai resigned as head of the Democratic People's Party (DPP) in November 2022, citing her party's poor performance in local elections earlier that month
Early Life
Tsai was born 31 August 1956 at Mackay Memorial Hospital in Zhongshan District, Taipei City on 31 August 1956, the youngest of nine (or eleven) children. Her father, Tsai Chieh-sheng (1918–2006), was a businessman who ran an auto repair shop, and her mother Chang Chin-fong (1925–2018) was a housewife. Her given name, Ing-wen , was chosen by genealogical naming practices. While these suggested the spelling , her father felt that the character had too many strokes and decided to replace it with the character . During her high school period, she studied at Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School. She studied law at the behest of her father. After graduating at the College of Law, National Taiwan University, in 1978, Tsai obtained a Master of Laws at Cornell University Law School in 1980. She then studied law at the London School of Economics and was awarded a Ph.D. in law from the University of London in 1984. Upon her return to Taiwan, she taught law at the School of Law of Soochow University and National Chengchi University, both in Taipei.
In the 1990s, Tsai was also appointed to the Fair Trade Commission and the Copyright Commission. She served as consultant for the Mainland Affairs Council and the National Security Council. She also led the drafting team on the Statute Governing Relations with Hong Kong and Macau
Education
- Ph.D. in law - University of London
Career
- China - President of the Republic
Recognition
Belize:
Order of Belize (2018)
El Salvador:
Grand Cross with Gold Star of the National Order of Doctor José Matías Delgado (2017)
Eswatini:
Collar of the Order of the Elephant (2018)
Guatemala:
Grand Collar of the Order of the Quetzal (2017)
Peace Ambassador
Haiti:
Grand Cross of the National Order of Honour and Merit Grand Cross of the National Order of Honour and Merit (2018)
Honduras:
Grand Cross with Gold Star of the Order of Francisco Morazán (2016)
Paraguay:
Grand Collar of the National Order of Merit (2016)
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Order of St Christopher and Nevis (2019)