Lai Ching-te

Biography

Lai Ching-te was born in 1959 in Wanli, in what is now New Taipei, the son of a coal miner who died in a mining accident when Lai was two. He studied rehabilitation medicine at National Taiwan University, served as an army medical officer on Kinmen, took his medical degree at National Cheng Kung University in 1989 and later earned a master's in public health at Harvard in 2003. He practised as a nephrologist and chief physician at National Cheng Kung University Hospital from 1989 to 1994.

Drawn into politics by Chen Ding-nan and alarmed by the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, Lai won a seat in the National Assembly for Tainan in 1996 for the Democratic Progressive Party and moved to the Legislative Yuan in 1999, serving until 2010. He was then the first mayor of the merged city of Tainan from 2010 to 2017 and premier under Tsai Ing-wen from 2017 to 2019.

After losing the 2019 DPP primary to Tsai, he became her running mate and served as vice president from 2020 to 2024. He became DPP chairman in January 2023, won the January 2024 presidential election against the Kuomintang's Hou Yu-ih, and took office on 20 May 2024. In 2025 his party backed a mass recall campaign against opposition legislators that failed to remove any of them.