Chen Shui-bian
President of the Republic of China
Democratic Transition / Modern Taiwan
1950–
Chen Shui-bian, born in 1950 in Guantian, Tainan, to an impoverished tenant farming family, rose through Taiwan's elite legal profession to become the first Democratic Progressive Party president and the central political figure of the island's full democratic consolidation. He graduated at the top of his class from the law department of National Taiwan University and worked as a corporate lawyer specializing in shipping cases before entering politics in 1980 as a defense attorney for the Kaohsiung Incident defendants. He was elected to the Taipei City Council in 1981 and to the Legislative Yuan as a tangwai-affiliated member in 1986, becoming one of the founding generation of the Democratic Progressive Party that year. In 1985 his wife Wu Shu-jen was deliberately run over and rendered paraplegic by a small truck while campaigning for him in Tainan County, an unsolved attack widely attributed to political opponents. He served two terms as a legislator known for procedural innovation and aggressive oversight, then was elected Mayor of Taipei in 1994 — the first DPP mayor of the capital — and reorganized the city government before narrowly losing reelection in 1998. He won the 2000 presidential election with 39.3 percent of the vote in a three-way race split by the KMT, achieving Taiwan's first peaceful transfer of power between parties and ending more than half a century of KMT rule. He was re-elected in 2004 by a wafer-thin margin of 0.2 percent on the day after he and Vice President Annette Lu were shot and wounded in a still-unresolved campaign-day attack. His presidency oversaw cross-strait economic engagement alongside increasingly assertive language about Taiwanese sovereignty, including referenda on Taiwan's UN application and a constitutional rewrite project that drew strong opposition from both Beijing and Washington. From 2006 onward his administration was engulfed by a series of corruption investigations centered on his family, prompting the Red Shirt mass protests led by Shih Ming-teh and a sharp decline in his political support. He left office in 2008 and was indicted within months on charges of embezzlement, money laundering, and bribery, ultimately convicted and serving prison time before being released on medical parole in 2015. He has remained a polarizing presence in DPP politics in the years since, continuing to issue political commentary while remaining a contested symbol of both the democratic transition and the corruption that shadowed its first decade. Chen is generally remembered as the politician who completed Taiwan's peaceful transfer of power and broke the KMT's institutional monopoly, but also as the figure whose corruption convictions deeply damaged the DPP's moral authority for the better part of a decade.
First peaceful party turnover in presidential election (2000)
President of the Republic of China
Chen Shui-bian
Era
Democratic Transition / Modern Taiwan
Lifespan
1950–
Chen Shui-bian, born in 1950 in Guantian, Tainan, to an impoverished tenant farming family, rose through Taiwan's elite legal profession to become the first Democratic Progressive Party president and the central political figure of the island's full democratic consolidation. He graduated at the top of his class from the law department of National Taiwan University and worked as a corporate lawyer specializing in shipping cases before entering politics in 1980 as a defense attorney for the Kaohsiung Incident defendants. He was elected to the Taipei City Council in 1981 and to the Legislative Yuan as a tangwai-affiliated member in 1986, becoming one of the founding generation of the Democratic Progressive Party that year. In 1985 his wife Wu Shu-jen was deliberately run over and rendered paraplegic by a small truck while campaigning for him in Tainan County, an unsolved attack widely attributed to political opponents. He served two terms as a legislator known for procedural innovation and aggressive oversight, then was elected Mayor of Taipei in 1994 — the first DPP mayor of the capital — and reorganized the city government before narrowly losing reelection in 1998. He won the 2000 presidential election with 39.3 percent of the vote in a three-way race split by the KMT, achieving Taiwan's first peaceful transfer of power between parties and ending more than half a century of KMT rule. He was re-elected in 2004 by a wafer-thin margin of 0.2 percent on the day after he and Vice President Annette Lu were shot and wounded in a still-unresolved campaign-day attack. His presidency oversaw cross-strait economic engagement alongside increasingly assertive language about Taiwanese sovereignty, including referenda on Taiwan's UN application and a constitutional rewrite project that drew strong opposition from both Beijing and Washington. From 2006 onward his administration was engulfed by a series of corruption investigations centered on his family, prompting the Red Shirt mass protests led by Shih Ming-teh and a sharp decline in his political support. He left office in 2008 and was indicted within months on charges of embezzlement, money laundering, and bribery, ultimately convicted and serving prison time before being released on medical parole in 2015. He has remained a polarizing presence in DPP politics in the years since, continuing to issue political commentary while remaining a contested symbol of both the democratic transition and the corruption that shadowed its first decade. Chen is generally remembered as the politician who completed Taiwan's peaceful transfer of power and broke the KMT's institutional monopoly, but also as the figure whose corruption convictions deeply damaged the DPP's moral authority for the better part of a decade.
First peaceful party turnover in presidential election (2000)