Chen Shui-bian’s career has a neat symmetry: a poor tenant farmer’s son becomes president, ends 55 years of one-party rule, and finishes in prison. Notably, the middle part was the less predictable.
From Guantian to the bar
Chen was born in 1950 in Guantian District, Tainan County, to an impoverished farming family. His birth certificate was not issued until February 1951, because nobody was confident he would survive. Bright from a young age, he entered National Taiwan University in 1969, switched from business administration to law, edited the law review and passed the bar exams before the end of his junior year with the highest score, which made him Taiwan’s youngest lawyer. He graduated in 1974.
Politics found him in 1980, when he defended participants in the Kaohsiung Incident before a military court. His client Huang Hsin-chieh and seven co-defendants, among them future vice president Annette Lu, were all found guilty. Chen nonetheless made his name with forceful arguments, and he later said the trial convinced him the system was unfair. In 1981 he won a seat on the Taipei City Council as a Tangwai candidate.
The costs came quickly. In January 1985 Chen was sentenced to a year in prison for libel over an article in a magazine he edited. After losing a race for Tainan county magistrate that November, he watched his wife, Wu Shu-chen, struck twice by a hand tractor while the couple thanked supporters. She was left paralysed from the waist down. His supporters saw intimidation; another theory holds it was a traffic accident. Chen lost his appeal in 1986 and served eight months in Tucheng Penitentiary. In 2022 the Transitional Justice Commission overturned the libel charges.
Legislator, then mayor
Chen joined the Democratic Progressive Party in 1987 and won a Legislative Yuan seat in 1989, where he helped lay out and moderate party positions on independence. He took the Taipei mayoralty in 1994, the first directly elected DPP mayor, helped by a split in the KMT vote. He kept many KMT administrators in place, reformed public works contracts, fined polluters and cracked down on illegal gambling and prostitution. He also renamed the road between KMT headquarters and the Presidential Palace as Ketagalan Boulevard, in acknowledgement of the aboriginal people of the Taipei basin. Time Asia placed Taipei among the top 50 cities in Asia.
He lost in 1998 to Ma Ying-jeou, despite winning more votes than in 1994, as the KMT drew in New Party supporters.
The presidency
On 18 March 2000, Chen won the presidency with 39 per cent of the vote after James Soong ran as an independent against the KMT’s Lien Chan. It was the first peaceful transfer of power to an opposition party in Taiwan. Chen had no clear mandate and inherited a bureaucracy loyal to the KMT, so he named a KMT conservative, Tang Fei, as his first premier. His inaugural pledge of the Four Noes and One Without promised no declaration of independence as long as Beijing had no intention of using force. Approval reached about 70 per cent.
It did not last. The opposition-controlled legislature blocked his policies, the stock market lost over half its value within a year, and unemployment hit 4.5 per cent. The fight over the Number Four Nuclear Power Facility ended with Tang’s resignation in October 2000, a halted construction order, and a KMT effort to recall the president. By the end of his first year his approval had dropped to 25 per cent.
Chen returned as DPP chairman in 2002 and was re-elected in 2004 after a narrow, contested victory over a joint ticket of Lien and Soong. He left office in 2008, succeeded by Ma, as the KMT beat the DPP in a landslide. He also served a second term as party chairman in 2007 and 2008.
Arrest and prison
In November 2008 Chen was arrested on corruption charges. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted to 20 years, and was released on medical parole in 2015.
