REFILING: PROFILE: Tsai Ing-wen – Taiwan’s 1st female president

During her visit to Japan’s Yamaguchi Prefecture last October, Tsai Ing-wen, leader of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, posed beneath a calligraphic text by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that read “solitary and motionless,” words from an ancient Chinese commentary on Yi Jing, or The Book of Changes.

On Saturday, things changed in Taiwan as voters elected Tsai as the first female president of the self-ruled island of 23 million people.

Her victory came as no surprise.

Indeed, if the bookish Tsai sometimes appears “solitary and motionless,” much has changed since her first presidential bid four years ago.

In 2012, Tsai not only lost to incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou, but her party suffered a crushing defeat in legislative polls, failing to secure enough seats to mount an effective opposition as Ma’s party, which has ruled Taiwan since 1945 except for an eight-year period of DPP rule between 2000 and 2008, once again took power.

This time around, Tsai entered the race as a clear front-runner, helping to raise the DPP’s profile as a potential ruling party.

Her political rise has been remarkable, not least because it has been so quick and from relative obscurity.

Born in the southern county of Pingtung in 1956, Tsai’s family relocated to Taipei, where her father worked as a mechanic for the United States’ military.

As the youngest child of a reasonably well-off family, Tsai was encouraged to pursue her education, majoring in law at National Taiwan University before traveling abroad for advanced degrees from Cornell in New York and London School of Economics.

Returning in the 1990s, she entered politics the hard way, beginning as a consultant for Taiwan’s eventually successful bid to join the World Trade Organization, and working her way up by way of a series of largely anonymous governmental tasks, including drafting former president Lee Teng-hui’s “special state-to-state” model for relations with China.

After the 2000 election of a DPP government, Tsai was given a high-profile appointment as chairwoman of the Mainland Affairs Council — the government agency responsible for crafting cross-strait policy.

After joining the party in 2004, Tsai went on to serve briefly as legislator-at-large and vice premier, resigning in 2007 along with the rest of the Cabinet of outgoing Premier Su Tseng-chang.

In 2008, Tsai became the first woman to lead the DPP since the party’s establishment in 1986. Two years later, she was reelected to the position, defeating a party stalwart more doctrinaire in his political views.

Despite its 2012 defeat in presidential and legislative elections, the DPP has made significant gains under Tsai’s leadership, with an impressive showing in the 2014 nationwide local elections.

Widely seen as “unorthodox” by DPP political standards, Tsai is temperamentally relaxed and pragmatic. Since assuming the party’s top job, she has avoided former leader Chen Shui-bian’s brinkmanship and pressure politic, opting instead for a more conciliatory approach aimed at reducing tension and building consensus.

She has relatively little campaign experience, losing the only two elections outside the party she ever contested.

Yet if some call Tsai’s inexperience a liability, others say that it frees her from the factional baggage of party heavyweights. She also compensates with a strong support team.

Publicly, Tsai is regarded as wordy and academic. As a woman hoping to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of East Asian politics, Tsai rarely shows emotion.

Fifty-nine and single, she gets her way through the skillful manipulation of gender assumptions, while never taking deference for granted.

In her recent book, “Ing’s Clique,” a term she uses for those who have rallied around her, she describes herself as not the kind of person to spend time crying over failures and defeats.

On the night of losing the 2012 election, Tsai said she was too busy consoling supporters and urging them forward to worry about herself.

Afterward, by her account, she tried to understand the 2012 defeat, seeking answers from those who had found her and the DPP wanting.

Four years of such reflection gave her the confidence to believe her time has come, and evidently the people of Taiwan agreed.

Expectation can be dangerous, of course.

Many challenges lie ahead, including a stagnant economy, aging population and long-needed constitutional reform.

Solitary and motionless, perhaps.

But change still happens, and on Saturday it happened in Taiwan.

==Kyodo

Category: Daily Witness, National