Lee Teng-hui
The Cornell-educated economist who turned Taiwan from a one-party dictatorship into a democracy and became its first directly elected president in 1996.
He inherited a one-party state and, within a decade, handed his people the vote. Lee Teng-hui took charge of a Taiwan still run by martial-law reflexes and left it a functioning democracy, winning in 1996 the first direct presidential election in the island's history. Admirers call him Mr. Democracy. Beijing branded him a separatist. Both labels point at the same achievement.
An unlikely reformer
Lee was an improbable figure to remake the Kuomintang from within. Born in 1923 near Taipei, he grew up under Japanese colonial rule, trained as an agricultural economist, and earned a doctorate from Cornell University in 1968. He was the first native-born Taiwanese, rather than a mainlander who had fled with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, to reach the top of the KMT. A quiet technocrat who had served as mayor of Taipei and governor of Taiwan province, he had been picked as vice president precisely because he seemed to threaten no one. When President Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son, died in 1988, Lee succeeded him and began dismantling the machinery of authoritarian rule from the inside.
Building a democracy
The changes came quickly. Lee abolished the emergency provisions that had frozen Taiwan's politics since the civil war, legalized opposition parties, freed the press, and forced the aging legislators who still claimed to represent all of mainland China to retire. He promoted a distinct Taiwanese identity, elevating local language and history after decades in which the KMT had taught that Taiwan was merely a province of one China. Constitutional amendments he steered through in the early 1990s created the direct presidential vote itself. In 1996 he stood in that first election and won 54 percent, even as China fired missiles nearby to frighten the electorate. The attempt backfired and his mandate only grew. When he stepped down in 2000, power passed peacefully to the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, the island's first democratic transfer of the presidency.
The separatist charge
The same trajectory made Lee the villain of Beijing's story. His 1995 visit to Cornell helped ignite the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, and in 1999 he inflamed relations further by describing dealings between Taipei and Beijing as a special state-to-state relationship, wording the PRC read as a claim to separate statehood. After leaving office in 2000 he grew bolder still, openly arguing for a Taiwan that was formally independent and permanently distinct from the mainland. When he died in 2020 at the age of 97, Taiwan mourned the man who had given it the ballot, while China marked the passing of a leader it blamed for the island's drift. The democracy he built is now among the freest in Asia and also one of the most dangerous flashpoints on earth, a double legacy Lee never tried to deny.