Who is Lai Ching-te, the leader in Taiwan’s presidential race?

Update: On January 13th Lai Ching-te won Taiwan’s presidential election.

LAI CHING-TE, Taiwan’s vice-president, has held almost every senior political post on the island. On January 13th the former doctor hopes to round out his CV with the top job: president. Who is the man leading the polls to become Taiwan’s next leader?

The veteran politician, also known as William Lai, represents the ruling, independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Before becoming vice-president in 2020 he was a lawmaker, a popular two-term mayor of Tainan, a southern city, and, from 2017 to 2019, prime minister under the departing president, Tsai Ing-wen. He has promised to stick to Ms Tsai’s careful approach to the island’s thorniest issue: Taiwan is in practice independent from China, so no further declarations on the subject are necessary. The government in Beijing considers the 24m-strong democracy to be part of its territory; it has threatened to take the island by force if necessary.

It was China that inspired Mr Lai, now 64, to go into politics. He grew up poor in a coal-mining village in northern Taiwan. His father, a miner, died when he was a toddler, leaving his mother to raise six children alone. These early experiences left him with a lifelong sympathy for “less advantaged people and minorities”, according to his spokeswoman. He studied medicine at prestigious universities in Taiwan and has a master’s degree in public health from Harvard. By 1996, when Taiwan held its first direct presidential election, a decade after emerging from nearly 40 years of martial law, Mr Lai was already involved in politics, supporting DPP candidates. But when China lobbed missiles into the sea near the island in a bid to sway the vote towards candidates friendly to itself, he felt compelled to run for office himself. “I decided I had a duty to participate in Taiwan’s democracy and help protect this fledgling experiment from those who wished it harm,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Two China-friendlier opponents are running against Mr Lai. Despite his narrow lead in the polls, victory for the DPP is far from certain. The party once appealed to young voters, but after eight years in power it has a stuffy image. Wage growth has fallen behind inflation and house prices are high. Mr Lai has stuck to the party’s goal of shutting down Taiwan’s nuclear power plants by 2025, stoking fears of an energy-price crunch. Most importantly, it has become clear that China will not have formal contact with DPP governments.

Mr Lai has provoked particular ire in China, having described himself in 2017 as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence”. Officials in Beijing recently dubbed him a “Taiwan independence liar” and “hoodlum to the extreme”. The Chinese are not the only ones worried about his remarks. American officials fear that a victory for Mr Lai could lead to an escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait. They worry about his proclivity for loose language: in July 2023 he said he hoped that Taiwan’s president would one day be able to “enter the White House”, something which would break with precedent and anger China. Although America is Taiwan’s main backer, it has diplomatic relations with China rather than the island.

If elected, Mr Lai will rely on America as he works to strengthen Taiwan’s fragile sovereignty. He has promised to reduce its economic dependence on China: Hong Kong and the mainland received 35% of Taiwan’s exports in the first 11 months of 2023. He hopes his island can sign more trade deals with foreign countries and forge more “partnerships with democracies around the world”. But he says he is still open to dialogue with the power across the strait. Many Taiwanese hope China will end a ban on its tourists visiting the island, which would boost the economy. Still, if Mr Lai wins, China will probably continue to threaten and isolate Taiwan. That prospect fuels criticism from the opposition presidential candidates that the DPP makes the island unsafe. Mr Lai, for his part, has portrayed his rivals as appeasers of an increasingly belligerent China, and says that under their rule, China’s outsize influence will help to destroy Taiwan’s hard-won democracy. ■