Tsai Ing-wen Quotes

Tsai Ing-wen (Chinese: 蔡英文; pinyin: Cài Yīngwén; Wade–Giles: Ts’ai4 Ying1-wen2; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Chhòa Eng-bûn; Paiwan: Tjuku Tsai; born 31 August 1956) is a Taiwanese politician who has been serving as the 7th president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 2016. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Tsai is the first female president of Taiwan and the second (after Chen Shui-bian) to be born in Taiwan after the end of the Chinese Civil War in December 1949. She served as chair of the DPP from 2020 to 2022, as well as from 2014 to 2018, and from 2008 to 2012. Her second presidential term is due to expire on 20 May 2024, when she will be succeeded by Lai Ching-te.
Tsai was born and raised in Taipei and studied law and international trade, and later became a law professor at Soochow University School of Law and National Chengchi University after earning an LLB from National Taiwan University and an LLM from Cornell Law School. She later studied law at the London School of Economics and was awarded a PhD. In 1993, as an independent (without party affiliation), she was appointed to a series of governmental positions, including trade negotiator for WTO affairs, by the then ruling party Kuomintang (KMT) and was one of the chief drafters of the special state-to-state relations doctrine under the President Lee Teng-hui.
During the first term of Chen Shui-bian's presidency, Tsai served as Minister of the Mainland Affairs Council. She joined the DPP in 2004 and served briefly as a DPP-nominated at-large member of the Legislative Yuan, and was then appointed as Vice Premier under Premier Su Tseng-chang until the cabinet's mass resignation in 2007. Following the DPP's defeat in the presidential election in 2008, she was elected as party chair of the DPP, but she resigned when the party lost the presidential election in 2012.
Tsai ran for New Taipei City mayorship in the 2010 municipal elections but was defeated by the KMT candidate, Eric Chu. In April 2011, Tsai became the first woman to be nominated by a major party as a presidential candidate in the history of Taiwan the Republic of China after defeating her former superior, Su Tseng-chang, in the DPP's primary election by a slight margin. In the 2012 Taiwanese presidential election, she was defeated by the then-president Ma Ying-jeou, but she won her first term of presidency in the 2016 presidential election by a landslide in a rematch against Eric Chu. In the 2020 presidential election, she was re-elected as president after winning the election against Han Kuo-yu. Tsai is the second president from the DPP, and also the first popularly elected president to have never served as the Mayor of Taipei.
Tsai was named one of Time's most influential people of 2020 and was ranked ninth on Forbes's most powerful women in 2021, being the second-highest ranking female politician after Kamala Harris (who placed second in the list, behind philanthropist MacKenzie Scott). Internationally, Tsai has been praised for her response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for standing up to pressure from the People's Republic of China. Tsai resigned as head of the Democratic People's Party (DPP) in November 2022, citing her party's poor performance in local elections earlier that month.