Lee Teng-hui (Chinese: 李登輝; pinyin: Lǐ Dēnghuī; 15 January 1923 – 30 July 2020) was a Taiwanese politician, economist, and agronomist who served as the fourth president of the Republic of China and chairman of the Kuomintang from 1988 to 2000. He was the first president to be born in Taiwan, the last to be indirectly elected, and the first to be directly elected. Born in Taihoku Prefecture, Lee was raised under Japanese rule. He was educated at Kyoto Imperial University and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II before graduating from National Taiwan University. He then studied agricultural economics in the United States, where he earned his doctorate from Cornell University in 1968, beginning a career as an economics professor. As a member of the Kuomintang (KMT), he was appointed Mayor of Taipei in 1978 and became governor of Taiwan Province in 1981 under President Chiang Ching-kuo. Lee succeeded Chiang as president after Chiang's death in 1988. During his presidency, Lee oversaw the end of martial law in Taiwan and led reforms to democratize the Republic of China. He was an advocate of the Taiwanese localization movement, sought to establish greater international recognition of the country, and has been credited as the president who completed Taiwan's democratic transition. After leaving office, he remained active in Taiwanese politics as a major influence on the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), and recruited for the party in the past. After Lee campaigned for TSU candidates in the 2001 Taiwanese legislative election, he was expelled by the KMT. His post-presidency was also marked by efforts to maintain greater relations between Taiwan and Japan.
Early life Lee was born on 23 January 1923, in the rural farming community of Sanshi Village near the fishing and trading town of Tamsui (now Tamsui District). He was of Hakka Chinese descent, with his ancestral home in Yongding, Tingzhou. His grandfather was a village leader in Sanshi and his father, Li Chin-lung, was a policeman who graduated from a Japanese police academy, owned land, and oversaw an irrigation service while working for the colonial Japanese government. Lee's mother also came from a local landowning family. He had an older brother, Lee Teng-chin (李登欽), who joined the colony's police academy, volunteered for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and was killed in action in the Philippines; Teng-chin's body is interned at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Japan.
When he was three years old, Lee and his brother were sent by their grandfather, Li Tsai-sheng, to a school which taught Chinese and Japanese; they were required to memorize Confucian and Chinese classics, including the Three Character Classic. Because his father, working in Taihoku Prefecture, was often transferred to different police precincts, Lee became a pupil at four different elementary schools in Xizhi (Hsi-chih), Nangang, Sanshi, and Tamsui. In 1929, while attending the Hsi-chih Common School, where most teachers were Japanese, he was selected as the class leader (head boy) and was considered one of the most outstanding students out of 47 pupils. He learned Chinese calligraphy and Japanese history before being transferred eventually to the Tamsui Common School, where he graduated in March 1935, ranked second out of 104 students. He sat the entrance examinations and applied to Taipei's top middle schools, but was rejected twice as the schools prioritized Japanese enrollment. He continued studying for the examinations at a juku and, in 1937, enrolled in the private Kuo-min Middle School (now Datong High School) in Taipei in 1938. A classmate, Lin Kai-pi, recalled: "He was very diligent and rarely played with us. Though he was taciturn, he was congenial and honest. He seemed to be blessed with a retentive memory. Fifteen years after our graduation, I could no longer recognize him, but he still called me by my name". As a child, Lee learned Zen Buddhism, developed an interest in Western classical music, and read Western philosophy—including transcendentalist works, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—in Japanese translations. In 1935, the Japanese colonial government reformed educational institutions in accordance with wartime demands of "Shintoism, state (kokutai), and indoctrination". As part of these reforms, Tamsui Middle School established a dojo for Japanese martial arts; Lee trained in calisthenics, judo, kendo, and attended weekly military drills. He performed exceptionally and was chosen to carry the school's hinomaru as the top student of his class. By 1940, the Kōminka movement and increasing pressure to Japanize led Lee's father to give the family Japanese names in place of their Chinese names. Teng-chin took the name Iwasato Takenori (岩里武則) and Teng-hui Iwasato Masao (岩里政男). Lee later recalled that, until he was 22 years old, he "always considered himself a Japanese".
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