Kuo Yu-hsin was born in Yilan in 1908 and graduated from the agriculture faculty of Taihoku Imperial University. After the war he ran businesses and the farmers' association in Yilan, entered the provisional provincial assembly in 1951, and was re-elected as a provincial assemblyman until 1972 — one of the "Five Dragons and One Phoenix." In a chamber the Kuomintang controlled outright, his motions were mostly voted down. Yilan kept sending him back.

In 1960 he was one of the founders of the China Democratic Party. When Lei Chen was arrested and the party stopped, Kuo was not charged, and he did not stop.

In 1975 he ran for an added legislative seat in Yilan. He lost, and the number of spoiled ballots in the district was too large for his supporters to accept. The young people who ran his campaign and fought the election lawsuit included Lin Yi-hsiung and Yao Chia-wen; his secretary was Chen Chu. Two years later the same kind of dispute played out in Zhongli, and that time the crowd did not go home.

He left Taiwan in 1977 and was then blacklisted and unable to return. In 1978, in the United States, he announced a run for president — at a time when the president was chosen by the National Assembly, the announcement was itself the protest. He died in Washington in August 1985. He had been away from Yilan eight years and never got back.