Hau Pei-tsun was born in 1919 in Yancheng, Jiangsu, and trained in artillery in the twelfth class of the Military Academy. He fought with the artillery against Japan and came to Taiwan with the Nationalist army in 1949. During the 1958 bombardment of Kinmen he commanded the Ninth Division on Lesser Kinmen. From 1965 he was Chiang Kai-shek's chief aide-de-camp.

In 1981 he became Chief of the General Staff and held the post for eight years, longer than anyone. For those years military power was effectively in his hands, and that is where every argument after 1990 began.

When the Kuomintang split into mainstream and non-mainstream factions in February 1990, he was on the non-mainstream side. He held the army and never used it. That May, Lee Teng-hui nominated him as premier. Protesters in the street denounced military interference in politics; inside the party the move was read as a trade — lifting him out of the army and into a post answerable to the legislature. The legislature was fully re-elected at the end of 1992, the new chamber questioned him day after day, and in February 1993 he resigned.

In 1996 he ran as Lin Yang-kang's vice-presidential partner, and both were expelled from the Kuomintang. He died in Taipei in March 2020, aged one hundred. He kept a diary for decades; in 2000 he published Diary of Eight Years as Chief of the General Staff.