Tsai Ing-wen

Biography

Tsai Ing-wen was born in Taipei in 1956, the youngest of eleven children of a Hakka businessman and a mother of Paiwan descent. She took a law degree at National Taiwan University in 1978, a master of laws at Cornell in 1980 and a doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1984, and then taught law at Soochow University and National Chengchi University in Taipei.

From the 1990s she advised the government on trade and cross-strait policy and helped draft the 'special state-to-state relations' doctrine under President Lee Teng-hui. Under Chen Shui-bian she chaired the Mainland Affairs Council from 2000 to 2004. She joined the Democratic Progressive Party in 2004, entered the Legislative Yuan on its party list and was vice premier from January 2006 to May 2007.

After the DPP's heavy defeat in 2008 she was elected its chair, the first woman to lead a major Taiwanese party, and she led it again in 2014-2018 and 2020-2022. She lost the 2012 presidential election to Ma Ying-jeou but won the 2016 election by a wide margin over Eric Chu, becoming Taiwan's first woman president. In December 2016 she spoke by telephone with US president-elect Donald Trump, the first such contact between the two sides' leaders since 1979.

In office from May 2016 to May 2024, she pursued pension, labour and judicial reform, and in 2019, two years after a Constitutional Court ruling, a law allowing same-sex marriage was passed and signed. She was re-elected in 2020 over Han Kuo-yu, hosted US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August 2022 and was succeeded by her vice president, Lai Ching-te.