Lee Teng-hui
Lee Teng-hui was a Taiwanese statesman, economist, and agronomist who served as the president of the Republic of China and chairman of the Kuomintang from 1988 to 2000. He was the first president to be born in Taiwan, the last to be indirectly elected, and the first to be directly elected.
Born in Taihoku Prefecture, Lee was raised under Japanese rule. He was educated at Kyoto Imperial University and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II before graduating from National Taiwan University. He then studied agricultural economics in the United States, where he earned his doctorate from Cornell University in 1968, beginning a career as an economics professor. As a member of the Kuomintang, he was appointed Mayor of Taipei in 1978 and became governor of Taiwan Province in 1981 under President Chiang Ching-kuo. Lee succeeded Chiang as president after Chiang's death in 1988.
During his presidency, Lee oversaw the end of martial law in Taiwan and led reforms to democratize the Republic of China. He was an advocate of the Taiwanese localization movement, sought to establish greater international recognition of the country, and has been credited as the president who completed Taiwan's democratic transition. After leaving office, he remained active in Taiwanese politics as a major influence on the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union, and recruited for the party in the past. After Lee campaigned for TSU candidates in the 2001 Taiwanese legislative election, he was expelled by the KMT. His post-presidency was also marked by efforts to maintain greater relations between Taiwan and Japan.
Early life
Lee was born on January 23, 1923, in the rural farming community of Sanshi Village near the fishing and trading town of Tamsui. He was of Hakka Chinese descent, with his ancestral home in Yongding, Tingzhou. His grandfather was a village leader in Sanshi, and his father, Li Chin-lung, was a policeman who graduated from a Japanese police academy, owned land, and oversaw an irrigation service while working for the colonial Japanese government. Lee's mother also came from a local landowning family. He had an older brother, Lee Teng-chin, who joined the colony's police academy, volunteered for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and was killed in action in the Philippines; his body is interned at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Japan.When he was three years old, Lee and his brother were sent by their grandfather, Li Tsai-sheng, to a school which taught Chinese and Japanese; they were required to memorize Confucian and Chinese classics, including the Three Character Classic. Because his father, working in Taihoku Prefecture, was often transferred to different police precincts, Lee became a pupil at four different elementary schools in Xizhi, Nangang, Sanshi, and Tamsui. In 1929, while attending the Hsi-chih Common School, where most teachers were Japanese, he was selected as the class leader and was considered one of the most outstanding students out of 47 pupils. He learned Chinese calligraphy and Japanese history before being transferred eventually to the Tamsui Common School, where he graduated in March 1935, ranked second out of 104 students. He sat the entrance examinations and applied to Taipei's top middle schools, but was rejected twice as the schools prioritized Japanese enrollment. He continued studying for the examinations at a juku and, in 1937, enrolled in the private Kuo-min Middle School in Taipei in 1938. A classmate, Lin Kai-pi, recalled: "He was very diligent and rarely played with us. Though he was taciturn, he was congenial and honest. He seemed to be blessed with a retentive memory. Fifteen years after our graduation, I could no longer recognize him, but he still called me by my name".
As a child, Lee learned Zen Buddhism, developed an interest in Western classical music, and read Western philosophy—including transcendentalist works, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—in Japanese translations. In 1935, the Japanese colonial government reformed educational institutions in accordance with wartime demands of "Shintoism, state, and indoctrination". As part of these reforms, Tamsui Middle School established a dojo for Japanese martial arts; Lee trained in calisthenics, judo, kendo, and attended weekly military drills. He performed exceptionally and was chosen to carry the school's hinomaru as the top student of his class. By 1940, the Kōminka movement and increasing pressure to Japanize led Lee's father to give the family Japanese names in place of their Chinese names. Teng-chin took the name and Teng-hui Iwasato Masao. Lee later recalled that, until he was 22 years old, he "always considered himself a Japanese".
Lee graduated from Tamsui in 1941, completing his courses in four years as opposed to the usual five. He was admitted to continue his studies at the prestigious , a Japanese-dominated higher school established in 1925 to send students for specialized studies at a college or university. Most students were sons of high-ranking Japanese officials or professionals; Taiwanese students that were able to gain admission were considered the best in Taiwan. Lee, one of only four Taiwanese students in his class, decided to study agricultural economics with the intent to work at the Southern Manchuria Railway Company after graduation. It normally took three years for a student to complete all the required courses but accelerated curriculum changes during World War II meant that he completed examinations after only two.Lee was a versatile student who was "an intense, tireless and voracious reader, with wide-ranging interests". Although he wanted to pursue his favorite subject, history, as a history teacher, he chose economics for better career prospects. He studied Japanese culture extensively and read the Kojiki, revered emperor Hirohito, and idolized Japanese historian Motoori Norinaga, author of the Kojiki-den, and colonial apologist Nitobe Inazō, whose 1899 Bushido: The Soul of Japan deeply influenced him. He also read The Pillow Book, The Tale of Genji, and was especially influenced by The Tale of the Heike and shosetsu works by Japanese writer Jirō Abe and Hyakuzō Kurata. His favorite autobiographical novelist was Natsume Sōseki. In addition, he read Japanese translations of T. E. Lawrence, The Evolution of Physics, and the treatises of Immanuel Kant. By the time he arrived at Taihoku High School, Lee owned a collection of more than 700 volumes of books published by Iwanami Shoten. He graduated from Taihoku with honors.
Education in Japan and World War II
With the Pacific War escalating, Lee decided to leave Taiwan to attend college in Japan and took the highly competitive Japanese college entrance exam in the summer of 1943. Despite having to score significantly higher than Japanese students to be considered, Lee was admitted to Kyoto Imperial University and was awarded a scholarship, a great honor for a Taiwanese student. He sailed to Japan and enrolled in the university's Faculty of Agriculture, which was considered the leading department of its field in the country at the time. He was especially interested in Karl Marx, Marxian economics, and admired Marxist economist Hajime Kawakami, whose philosophy influenced much of the faculty at Kyoto, and Thomas Carlyle. He took multiple courses in German and English, but continued to rely on Japanese translations for reading Carlyle, Goethe, and Faustian literature. He was a student at Kyoto Imperial University for 14 months between 1943 and 1944 before the war and mass mobilization in Japan interrupted his studies.Lee left Kyoto to volunteer for service in the Imperial Japanese Army as one of 36 Taiwanese volunteers from the Kansai region. In December 1944, he was sent back to Taiwan to be stationed at an anti-aircraft unit in Kaohsiung. He then was ordered to return to Japan in January 1945 to train at an anti-aircraft military academy in Chiba Prefecture. While sailing from Taiwan to Japan, he stayed briefly in Japanese-occupied Qingdao—his first time setting foot in mainland China. Once in Japan, he studied radar operation and trained alongside kamikaze pilots as a member of the academy's eleventh class, graduating in April 1945 with the rank of second lieutenant. He was stationed at Nagoya and witnessed the city's bombing. According to biographer Shih-shan Tsai: "instead of shooting down enemy aircraft, all he could and did do was to bring the wounded to the hospital, help children and the elderly evacuate to the country from Nagoya, drill civilian volunteers in fighting with bamboo spears, and dig pillboxes along Ise Bay to prepare for an American invasion".
When the Surrender of Japan was announced, Lee was discharged from Nagoya and traveled to Tokyo, where he met with other Taiwanese students. Beginning in October 1945, when prominent Japanese Communists Maruyama Masao, Hisao Ōtsuka, and Fukutake Tadashi were released from prison and reformed the Japanese Communist Party, Lee and other Taiwanese students began a renewed interest in Communist literature. Lee read multiple Japanese translations of Marx's Das Kapital and went to Tokyo Station to welcome Communist leader Sanzō Nosaka's return from China and Russia. He enrolled in Kyoto Imperial University again and graduated in 1946.
Return to Taiwan
In the spring of 1946, Lee left Japan, returning to Taiwan in March on an American liberty ship. With the Retrocession of Taiwan transferring governance of the island to the Republic of China, the mainland Ministry of Education allowed all Taiwanese students previously enrolled in the Imperial Universities to enroll at National Taiwan University, which Lee did, joining the university's Department of Agricultural Economics as one of its only two students. He had two professors, one of whom was Hsu Ching-chung, who later served as vice premier. Also at this time, Lee began reading more deeply into Chinese literature, especially the works of Hu Shih, Guo Moruo, and Lu Xun. His worldview was also influenced by reading Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. He continued an interest in Marxism, joining a Marxist study club at NTU and writing his undergraduate thesis, "A Study of the Problems of Taiwan’s Agricultural Labor," by applying Marxist class struggle and surplus labour theories. He briefly joined the Chinese Communist Party twice—once in September 1946 and again in either October or November 1947—but withdrew his membership both times.Following the recommendation of communist youth leader, Lee joined the, a secret communist group, in October 1947, but withdrew six months later in June 1948. Members of both the New Democracy Association and the Marxist study club were later arrested in May 1950. Lee's close association with Taiwanese communist groups as a student became the subject of scrutiny later in life. In 1969, he was arrested by KMT secret police but released after a series of investigations and interrogations. Years later, in 2002, Lee recalled the reason for joining communist groups as being "out of a young man's naive vision for his country".