Do we like them?

Do we like Lee Teng-hui?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and a huge democratic legacy, held back by one contested stance on islands and thin evidence on how he treated people day to day.

Lee was born in 1923 in Sanzhi, north of Taipei, when Taiwan was a Japanese colony. He studied at Kyoto Imperial University, was drafted into the Japanese army near the war's end without seeing combat, then went on to a Cornell PhD in agricultural economics in 1968. He joined the KMT in 1971, climbed from Taipei mayor to vice president, and took the top job in 1988 when Chiang Ching-kuo died.

Then the surprise: the KMT insider turned reformer. After the 1990 Wild Lily student protests he met the student leaders and committed to democratic change. He ended the emergency Mobilisation Period in 1991, retired long-serving legislators and oversaw the first direct presidential election in 1996. His 1995 Cornell speech angered Beijing, which fired missiles around Taiwan, and he still won re-election with 54 per cent.

Leaving office didn't end the stoushes. The KMT expelled him after he backed the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union, and his 1999 line that cross-strait ties were “state-to-state relations of a special nature” enraged Beijing. At home, critics say his constitutional changes concentrated power in the presidency, and that his KMT leadership strengthened ties with local factions and gangsters. That's critics talking, not a court finding, and KMT-side and Beijing-side assessments of him are far harsher than Taiwan's pro-democracy camp.

There was also a criminal case. In 2011 prosecutors indicted him over allegations that US$7.8 million in secret diplomatic funds was diverted to set up the Taiwan Research Institute. In November 2013 the Taipei District Court acquitted him, finding no evidence he knew where the money went, though his aide was sentenced.

On the harm check, nothing turned up on LGBTQ+ people, women or climate, and he died in 2020 well before most of those fights. The one contested call is Tokyo, July 2015, where he said the Senkaku islands are Japanese, not Taiwanese. Taiwan's Presidential Office called that “an act that humiliates the nation and forfeits its sovereignty”, and the KMT said it regretted the remarks. Whether that reads as plain history or giving away territory depends on your politics, and it isn't harm to people. He also argued Taiwan should rely on itself rather than China.

The good stuff is big and structural. The 2000 handover of power from the KMT to the DPP happened on his watch, and he said that whatever he did as president he did with the people in his heart. A Taiwanese leader who built the machinery that lets voters throw out the government is hard to argue with, whatever the party.