Tsai Ing-wen

Her father, Tsai Chieh-sheng (1918–2006), was a businessman who ran an auto repair shop, and her mother Chang Chin-fong (1925–2018) was a housewife.

Her given name, Ing-wen (英文), was chosen by genealogical naming practices.

While these suggested the spelling 瀛文, her father felt that the character 瀛 had too many strokes and decided to replace it with the character 英.

During her high school period, she studied at Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School.

She studied law at the behest of her father.

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.

Tsai Ing-wen ( born 31 August 1956) is a Taiwanese politician who has been serving as the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 2016.

Tsai was born at Mackay Memorial Hospital in Zhongshan District, Taipei City on 31 August 1956, the youngest of eleven children.

After graduating at the College of Law, National Taiwan University, in 1978, Tsai obtained a Master of Laws at Cornell Law School in 1980.

She then studied law at the London School of Economics and was awarded a Ph.D. in law from the University of London in 1984.

Upon her return to Taiwan, she taught law at the School of Law of Soochow University and National Chengchi University, both in Taipei.

In the 1990s, Tsai was also appointed to the Fair Trade Commission and the Copyright Commission.

She served as consultant for the Mainland Affairs Council and the National Security Council.

She also led the drafting team on the Statute Governing Relations with Hong Kong and Macau.

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.

In 2000, Tsai was given the high-profile appointment of chair 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.

Confirming the widely held belief that she maintained Pan-Green sympathies, Tsai joined the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2004.

She was subsequently nominated by the DPP to be a candidate in the 2004 legislative election and was elected as a legislator-at-large.

On 26 January 2006, Tsai was appointed to the post of vice president of the Executive Yuan, a position commonly referred to as vice premier.

She concurrently served as chairwoman of the Consumer Protection Commission.

On 17 May 2007, Tsai, along with the rest of the cabinet of out-going Premier Su Tseng-chang, resigned to make way for incoming Premier Chang Chun-hsiung and his cabinet.

Premier Chang named Chiou I-jen, the incumbent secretary-general of the Presidential Office to replace Tsai as vice premier.

She then served as the chair of TaiMedBiologics, a biotechnology company based in Taiwan.

The Kuomintang accused Tsai of contracting government work out to TaiMedBiologics during her term as vice premier, while planning to leave the government and lead the company afterward.

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.

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 will expire and she will be succeeded by her vice president, Lai Ching-te, on 20 May 2024.

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 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 #9 on Forbes's most powerful women and #2 female politician after Kamala Harris of 2021.

Internationally, Tsai has been praised for her response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for standing up to pressure from the Government of 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.

Tsai's second presidential term will end in May 2024 having reached the two-term constitutional limit.