Ma Ying-jeou

Biography

Ma Ying-jeou was born in 1950 in Kowloon, British Hong Kong, into a family of Kuomintang mainlanders who moved to Taiwan in 1951. He joined the KMT in 1968, studied law at National Taiwan University, graduating in 1972, and after service as a Marine Corps officer earned a master's degree at New York University in 1976 and a doctorate in juridical science at Harvard in 1981, with a thesis on seabed boundaries in the East China Sea.

Back in Taiwan in 1981 he became English secretary and interpreter to President Chiang Ching-kuo and taught law at National Chengchi University. At 38 he joined the cabinet as head of the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, later served as deputy head of the Mainland Affairs Council and, as justice minister from 1993 to 1996, prosecuted vote-buying and corruption so hard that he lost party backing and was moved aside.

In 1998 he unseated Chen Shui-bian as mayor of Taipei and was re-elected in 2002. Elected KMT chairman in 2005, he resigned in 2007 when he was indicted over his mayoral allowance fund; he was acquitted later that year. He won the 2008 presidential election by a landslide and was re-elected in 2012.

As president he pursued closer ties with mainland China, including the 2010 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement. His second term was hurt by the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement and heavy KMT losses in that year's local elections, after which he gave up the party chairmanship. In November 2015 he met Xi Jinping in Singapore. After leaving office in 2016 he taught law at Soochow University.