Lee Teng-hui, who as president of Taiwan led his transformation from an island under authoritarian rule to one of Asia’s most vibrant and prosperous democracies, died Thursday in Taipei, the capital. He was 97 years old.
The office of the President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, announced the death at the Taipei Veterans Hospital. Press reports said the cause was septic shock and multiple organ failure.
Mr. Lee’s insistence that Taiwan be treated as a sovereign state angered the Chinese government in Beijing, which considered Taiwan as part of its territory and pushed for its unification with the continent under communist rule. His stance posed a political dilemma for the United States, as it sought to improve relations with Beijing while dissuading it from taking military measures to press its claims on the island.
As president from 1988 to 2000, the first to be elected by popular vote in Taiwan, Mr. Lee never withdrew from disputes with the mainland, and continued to be a thorn in his side in his later years. In 2018, he unsuccessfully called a referendum to declare that the country’s name was Taiwan, not the Republic of China, as it is formally known, a measure that would have paved the way for sovereignty.
“China’s objective regarding Taiwan has never changed,” he told The New York Times in a rare interview as the Chinese government was trying to further isolate the island from the international community. “That goal is to swallow the sovereignty of Taiwan, exterminate Taiwanese democracy and achieve final unification.”
President Tsai’s office praised Mr. Lee’s accomplishments and said in a statement: “The president believes that former President Lee’s contribution to Taiwan’s democratic journey is irreplaceable and his death is a great loss to the country.”
Mr. Lee entered Taiwan politics during the dictatorial regimes of the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist Party and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, who assumed power after his father’s death in 1975. The nationalists ruled brutally, It peaked in 1947 with what became known as the February 28 incident, in which up to 28,000 Taiwanese were massacred by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in response to street protests. Nationalists imposed martial law two years later, and it was not lifted until 1987 by Chiang Ching-kuo.
Born in Taiwan, Mr. Lee joined the Nationalist Party, known as Kuomintang or KMT, in 1971 and became Minister of Agriculture. Later he was mayor of Taipei and governor of the province of Taiwan before being elected vice president in 1984.
When Chiang Ching-kuo died of a heart attack in 1988, Mr. Lee succeeded him, becoming the first native president of Taiwan.
Mr. Lee dismantled the dictatorship and worked to end animosity between those born on the mainland and native Taiwanese. He pushed for the concept of “New Taiwanese,” a term that suggests that islanders, regardless of background, were forging a common identity based on a democratic political system and increasing prosperity.
He pursued a deliberately ambiguous policy with mainland China, switching between rigid hostility, tentative conciliation, and defiant independence. His attempts to demonstrate Taiwan’s international sovereignty sometimes sparked mainland China in saber-rattling military exercises.
One such episode occurred after Mr. Lee’s trip to the United States in 1995, apparently to visit Cornell University, his alma mater. China accused the United States and Taiwan of colluding to elevate the island’s diplomatic status. In a demonstration of Beijing’s anger, Chinese military forces fired test missiles into the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from the mainland. Washington responded by placing warships off the coast of Taiwan. The issue strained relations between Washington and Beijing for months.
Mr. Lee again infuriated Beijing in a 1999 German television interview by suggesting that relations between Taiwan and China should be conducted on a “special state-to-state” basis. That caused diatribes in the Chinese official media. The People’s Liberation Army Journal denounced Mr. Lee as “the number one scum in the nation.” The Xinhua News Agency called him a “deformed test-tube baby grown in the political laboratory of hostile forces against China.”
But such attacks made Mr. Lee only more popular in Taiwan. A tall, silver-haired, tough-minded activist with a dazzling smile, he used his charisma to gather support. He spoke the jargon of ports and factories, rode trucks with megaphones with local candidates, and threw firecrackers to please the deities of local temples.
“People like Lee Teng-hui because he defends them against China’s dictators,” Chen Shui-bian, the mayor of Taipei, said in 1996,
Lee Teng-hui was born on January 15, 1923 in Sanzhi, a town on the outskirts of Taipei. His father was a police detective serving the Japanese authorities who ruled Taiwan as a colony from 1895 to 1945. Mr. Lee studied agronomy in Japan at the Imperial University of Kyoto and served as a second lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army during the World War. II, although he never saw action.
He returned to Taiwan after the war and secretly joined the Communist Party of China while completing his undergraduate work at National Taiwan University. “I read everything I could get from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir, “The Road to Democracy.”
He joined the protests in the February 28, 1947 incident, but soon renounced Marxism and joined the KMT. The party then destroyed its Communist Party records when it became politically prominent.
Mr. Lee married Tseng Wen-fu, the daughter of a prosperous landowning family, in 1949, and they both became devoted Presbyterians. They had two daughters, Anna and Annie; his only son, Hsien-wen, died of cancer. He is survived by his wife and daughters, as well as a granddaughter and grandson.
Taiwan became a separate political entity in 1949 after the civil war in China brought Mao’s communists to power, forcing the defeated Chiang government to flee to the island, about 100 miles from the mainland.
For the next 30 years, Taiwan, supported by the United States, maintained the fiction that it was the seat of China’s legitimate government in exile. Washington finally recognized the communist government in Beijing in 1979 and severed its formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But he continued to guarantee Taiwan’s security against a continental invasion and backed negotiations between the two sides aimed at reunification.
Mr. Lee cultivated ties to the United States during two academic stays, received a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Iowa State University in 1953 and a Ph.D. from Cornell in 1968. In between, he taught at Taiwanese universities, gaining recognition as a scholar in agricultural economics and attracting the attention of Chiang Ching-kuo, then his father’s deputy prime minister. On the recommendation of young Chiang, Mr. Lee was appointed minister without portfolio. He distinguished himself by promoting programs that raised health standards and agricultural income.
With Chiang Ching-kuo installed as president, Mr. Lee was appointed mayor of Taipei in 1978 and began modernizing the capital’s road and sewer systems. As governor of the province of Taiwan, from 1981 to 1984, he pushed for land reforms that helped achieve balanced growth between urban and rural areas, still a hallmark of Taiwan.
Mr. Chiang selected Mr. Lee as his Vice President in 1984. It was a dramatic departure from the usual practice of appointing only former Chinese from Mainland China to senior government officials. His selection was seen as a gesture towards native Taiwanese, who had been politically powerless despite representing 85 percent of the population.
When Mr. Lee became president in 1988 because of Mr. Chiang’s death, he moved to break the autocratic system of the Chiang family, publicly lamenting the February 28 massacres. It ended decades of state of emergency measures, allowed citizens to send emails to family members on the continent and visit them, banned street protests, eased press restrictions, promoted a multi-party system and decreed open elections for the National Assembly.
The KMT easily retained control of the legislature, but more than three-quarters of the seats went to native Taiwanese.
“What had been a strict police state under Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo is now the most democratic society in the Chinese-speaking world,” The Times stated in a 1992 editorial.
Mr. Lee was directly elected in 1996, in Taiwan’s first open presidential contest. Seeking to start a dialogue with Beijing, he supported a “one China, two equal governments” policy. But he insisted that Taiwan would join mainland China only if China became a democratic and capitalist society. Meanwhile, he again called for “state-to-state” relations between Taipei and Beijing, a policy that the continent rejected. Instead, Chinese officials tried to persuade other countries to cut all ties to Taiwan, claiming that any improvement in relations would come only after Lee retired.
Mr. Lee was succeeded in 2000 by Chen Shui-bian, the candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party whose election ended the KMT government. In his two terms, Mr. Chen presided over a major expansion of Taiwan’s trade and investment in China, a process that had already been underway during Lee’s presidency. But like his predecessor, Chen foiled Beijing’s attempts to get Taipei to recognize the sovereignty of mainland China and adopt a timetable for unification.
Lee came out of retirement in 2018 to help create the Formosan Alliance, a new party calling for Taiwan’s formal independence from China. But the party did not go ahead with a promised referendum on independence.
Later in life, Mr. Lee endured the ignominy of the corruption charges. In June 2011, he was indicted, along with a financier, Liu Tai-ying, on embezzlement charges of nearly $ 8 million in public funds during his presidency. Mr. Lee was acquitted in 2013.
He consoled himself by proclaiming that he had helped his island of 23 million inhabitants serve as a beacon for the 1.4 billion people on the continent. Or, as he wrote in his memoirs, “We have developed the economy and embraced democracy, becoming the model for a future reunited China.”
Austin Ramzy contributed reporting.
