Tsai Ing-wen Quotes

Tsai Ing-wen (Chinese: 蔡英文; pinyin: Cài Yīngwén; born 31 August 1956) is a Taiwanese politician and legal scholar who served as the seventh president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2016 to 2024. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), she intermittently served as chair of the DPP from 2008 to 2012, 2014 to 2018, and 2020 to 2022. She was the first woman to hold the presidency in Taiwan's history.
Tsai was born in Taipei and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in law from National Taiwan University and Cornell University, respectively. She went to England to study law at the London School of Economics, where she received a PhD in 1984, and became a law professor. In 1993, she was appointed to a series of governmental positions by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party and was one of the chief drafters of the special state-to-state relations doctrine under 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 party member of the Legislative Yuan. She was appointed as Vice Premier under Su Tseng-chang but resigned 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 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 incumbent 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, becoming the first woman to serve as Taiwan's president. In the 2020 presidential election, she was re-elected as president after winning the election against Han Kuo-yu. Her presidency is succeeded by Lai Ching-te of the DPP on 20 May 2024. Tsai is the second president from the DPP, and also the first popularly elected president to have never served as the Mayor of Taipei.