Lai Ching-te
Lai Ching-te, also known as William Lai, is a Taiwanese politician, physician, and nephrologist who has served as the eighth president of the Republic of China since 2024. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party, he has been the party's chairman since 2023.
Born in Taipei County, Lai studied medicine at National Taiwan University and National Cheng Kung University. He graduated from Harvard University with a master's degree in public health in 2003. After practicing internal medicine as a chief physician at two hospitals, Lai won election in 1996 to represent Tainan City in the National Assembly, then served as a member of the Legislative Yuan from 1999 to 2010. He was the first mayor of Tainan from 2010 to 2017 and the 26th premier of the Republic of China from 2017 to 2019.
In the 2019 Democratic Progressive presidential primary, Lai ran unsuccessfully against incumbent Tsai Ing-wen for control of the party, but became her running mate in the 2020 presidential election, in which he was elected vice president of the Republic of China. As vice president, Lai was nominated by the DPP to be its presidential candidate for 2024 and defeated Kuomintang nominee Hou Yu-ih in the 2024 presidential election. He took office as president on 20 May 2024.
Early life and education
Lai was born on 6 October 1959, in Wanli, a rural coastal town in northern Taipei County. He was the youngest child in a poor family of five children. His mother, Lai Tong-hao, was the daughter of a local landlord. His father, Lai Chao-chin, was a poor coal miner whose parents immigrated from Gukeng, Yunlin. Their ancestral home was in Banzai, Fujian; his paternal ancestors migrated from Fujian to Taiwan during the Tongzhi era. When Lai was two years old, his father died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a mining accident. Afterwards, Lai's widowed mother raised him and his siblings as a single parent in a two-story dwelling.Lai attended Wanli Junior High School, a new junior high in New Taipei City, and became its first pupil to gain admission to Taipei Municipal Chien Kuo High School, the city's top senior high school for boys. After graduating from Chien Kuo in 1979, he enrolled at National Taiwan University to study veterinary medicine. Because he intended to enter medical school, he later transferred departments to study physical medicine and rehabilitation at the university and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1984. As an undergraduate, Lai defrayed his college expenses by working as a private tutor.
After college, Lai enlisted in the Republic of China Army and served on an outlying island in Kinmen County, where he was the platoon leader of a medical battalion. He was recognized by general for outstanding leadership during his service years and was honorably discharged. He then attended medical school at National Cheng Kung University, where studied under health director. He received a Doctor of Medicine from the post-baccalaureate medical education department in 1989, specializing in internal medicine.
During his time as a legislator, Lai applied to and was admitted by Harvard University to pursue graduate studies in public health. From 2000 to 2003, he attended the Harvard School of Public Health during legislative recesses, earning his Master of Public Health in 2003. His classmates at Harvard included future Tainan mayor Huang Wei-che. During his time studying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lai often spectated baseball games at Fenway Stadium; after the recruitment of Chien-Ming Wang, he became a fan of the New York Yankees. In 2004, he was a visiting scholar at the U.S. Department of State.
Medical career
After graduating from medical school, Lai interned at National Cheng Kung University Hospital and became a resident physician there. He earned two specialist medical licenses: one in internal medicine and another in nephrology. His main field of study was spinal cord damage; he was a national consultant for such injuries.From 1989 to 1994, Lai was the chief physician in nephrology at both National Cheng Kung University Hospital and Sin-lau Hospital, the latter a hospital of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan.
Legislative career
In 1994, while still working as a chief physician, Lai became the chairman of a Tainan physicians' association which supported Chen Ding-nan's bid for the Governorship of Taiwan Province. Although the campaign was unsuccessful, Chen became a political mentor to Lai and inspired him to abandon his medical career in order to enter politics instead.Against his mother's wishes, Lai left his medical practice after witnessing the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995–1996. He ran for election in 1996 and won a seat to represent Tainan City in the National Assembly. In that year's assembly election, he was the candidate who won the most votes in Tainan. As an assembly legislator, Lai campaigned to abolish the National Assembly, and led efforts to amend the constitution to freeze the Taiwan Provincial Government.
Lai joined the New Tide faction and stood as a candidate in the 1998 Legislative Yuan election, representing the Democratic Progressive Party in the second ward of Tainan City. He was successful in this election, and subsequently was reelected three times in 2001, 2004, and 2008. In total he served 11 years as a legislator, and was selected as Taiwan's "Best Legislator" four times in a row by Taipei-based NGO Citizen Congress Watch.
Mayor of Tainan (2010–2017)
With the 2010 reorganization of the municipalities in Taiwan, Tainan City and Tainan County were amalgamated into a single municipality, called Tainan. After successfully being selected in the Democratic Progressive Party primaries in January 2010, Lai stood as the DPP candidate for the mayoral election on 27 November 2010, gaining 60.41% to defeat Kuomintang candidate Kuo Tien-tsai. He took office on 25 December 2010.Lai prioritized fiscal sustainability by implementing zero-based budgeting and abolishing the discretionary project funds for city councillors. This move, while triggering significant political friction with the Tainan City Council, ultimately helped the city reduce its overall debt and achieve a balanced budget by 2015. His infrastructure agenda focused on regional integration and disaster resilience; he consolidated fragmented transit routes into six major bus trunk lines in 2013 and implemented a ten-year flood protection standard.
As a result of his strong showing in the mayoral election, coupled with his relative youth and his leadership of the DPP heartland city of Tainan, Lai was considered a potential candidate for a presidential run in 2016. Several opinion polls ranked Lai as the most popular of the 22 city and county heads in Taiwan. During this period of high approval, Lai made a two-day visit to Shanghai in June 2014 to inaugurate an exhibition for the late Taiwanese painter Tan Ting-pho. During the trip, he met with Chinese Communist Party officials and notably spoke at Fudan University, where he stated that Taiwanese independence was a widespread consensus in Taiwan, emphasizing the importance of democratic self-determination.
Lai stood for reelection on 29 November 2014 against Huang Hsiu-shuang of the Kuomintang. His opponent was considered to have such an uphill task in the DPP stronghold that she rode a black horse through the streets of Tainan as an election stunt; a hopeful allusion to her status as a "dark horse". Lai, on the other hand, did not plan many campaign activities, choosing to focus on mayoral duties. He eventually won the election by 45 percentage points, the largest margin of victory in any of the municipal races in the election.
In 2015, Mayor Lai and his administration sparked a localized constitutional crisis by boycotting the Tainan City Council for nearly eight months. Beginning in early January, Lai refused to attend council sessions to protest the election of Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao, who was then facing vote-buying allegations. This unprecedented standoff led the Control Yuan to impeach Lai on 4 August, 2015, ruling that his refusal to submit to interpellation violated the Local Government Act and undermined the democratic system of checks and balances. The political deadlock coincided with Taiwan's dengue fever outbreak, which centered in Tainan and resulted in over 22,000 infections and 112 deaths in the city that year. On 28 August, amid the escalating epidemic, Lai announced that his reform efforts had achieved preliminary goals and returned to the council to deliver a report. The case was subsequently referred to the Commission on the Disciplinary Sanctions of Functionaries under the Judicial Yuan, which issued an admonition to Lai for his actions.
Lai stepped down as Mayor in September 2017, after being appointed to the Premiership. He was succeeded in acting capacity by Lee Meng-yen.
Premiership (2017–2019)
In September 2017, Premier Lin Chuan tendered his resignation to President Tsai Ing-wen. A poll showed Lin's approval rating to be a mere 28.7%, with 6 in 10 respondents dissatisfied with the performance of his cabinet. On 5 September, President Tsai announced at a press conference that Lai would become the country's next head of the Executive Yuan.Lai took office on 8 September as the Premier of the Republic of China. Following his appointment, Tsai's approval ratings reached 46%, rebounding by more than 16 points since August. Lai made his first appearance as premier at the Legislative Yuan on 26 September, becoming the first premier to openly advocate for Taiwan independence in the legislature. He stated that he was a political worker who advocated for Taiwan independence, but argued that Taiwan was already an independent sovereign nation called the Republic of China and therefore did not need a separate declaration of independence.
During his tenure as premier, Lai styled his cabinet as one of "practical action." To address economic bottlenecks and facilitate Taiwanese businesses returning from China amid the China–United States trade war, he launched initiatives to resolve the "five shortages"—land, water, power, talent, and labor. In the early months of his premiership, Lai enjoyed high public support; by October 2017, surveys showed his approval ratings reaching as high as 68.8%, while another poll during the same period recorded 58% satisfaction against 21% dissatisfaction.
However, this momentum shifted as his administration faced intense criticism over the second amendment to the Labor Standards Act, which was perceived as a rollback of labor rights. His public image was further strained in November 2017 by the "Merit" controversy, where his suggestion that low-paid caregivers should view their work as "performing an act of merit" led to widespread backlash among the youth and the satirical renaming of the Executive Yuan as the "Merit Yuan" by protesters. Further leadership strain was caused by his defense of the Shen'ao Power Plant expansion using "clean coal" and the National Taiwan University presidential selection dispute, the latter of which led to the successive resignations of three Ministers of Education within a single year.
These controversies were reflected in a steady decline of public support. By mid-2018, Lai's approval ratings dropped to the 40% range, with his dissatisfaction rating beginning to eclipse his satisfaction rating for the first time. By the end of the year, his approval rating further declined to a record low of 37%, while his dissatisfaction reached 49%. Following the Democratic Progressive Party's heavy defeat in the 2018 local elections—in which the party's total number of governed seats dropped from 13 to 6, including the loss of its long-held stronghold in Kaohsiung and the key municipality of Taichung—Lai tendered his resignation in November 2018. Although President Tsai Ing-wen initially requested him to stay, Lai remained in office to stabilize the government until the general budget was cleared by the Legislative Yuan. On 11 January 2019, Lai and his cabinet resigned en masse, and he was succeeded by Su Tseng-chang.