Taiwan’s New Leader Focused, Adaptable

He may have entered political life ‘by accident,’ as an acquaintance once described it, but he didn’t pursue it that way.

Chen Shui-bian’s victory Saturday in Taiwan’s second presidential election capped 20 years of ceaseless campaigning, workaholic habits and a dogged rise through the ranks.

Chen once had to be reminded to smile, and he still can come off as stiffly as a Taiwanese Al Gore. But he has plenty to smile about now. His stunning win ended half a century of political domination by the Nationalist Party. And it left Beijing and Washington scrambling to figure out just what sort of man is about to lead an island caught in the middle of a tricky--and potentially explosive--three-way relationship.

At times, the lawyer-turned-politician has seemed a zealot, known for shouting ‘Long live Taiwanese independence!’ and for driving Taipei’s prostitutes underground. At others, he has shown himself a pragmatist willing to accommodate and to forge a ‘Third Way,’ after the fashion of peers like Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Behind it all is a fierce intelligence and focus that helped Chen, 49, pull himself up by the bootstraps and ultimately claim Taiwan’s top job, even if he has not shed his image as a distant, sometimes calculating technocrat.

‘Chen Shui-bian is a quick study,’ said Parris Chang, a legislator with Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party and a potential minister in his new government. ‘And he can be more or less moderate.’

His humble origin gave little hint of his eventual success.

Chen was born Feb. 18, 1951, in southwest Taiwan, to a poor household. His father toiled as an agricultural day laborer and his illiterate mother worked at odd jobs. His given name is partly a reflection of that poverty: Shui-bian refers to the bamboo poles that peasants would lay across their shoulders to carry buckets of water.

In the oft-repeated Horatio Alger tale of his childhood, Chen learned to write by drawing on the whitewashed walls around his home, which had neither a desk nor paper. At school, he proved to be a standout, winning his first trip to the movies as a class prize for his good grades.

&#’My mother was so proud of me that she bought me my first suit and new shoes,’ Chen told an official biographer. ‘I remember that the movie was ‘Ben Hur.’ But I do not remember seeing it because I fell asleep in the darkened theater.’

It was the first of many prizes for academic performance. He was the top grade school student in his county and earned the highest score in all of Taiwan the year he took his college entrance exams. He attended National Taiwan University, the island’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, where he studied business before switching to law.

After graduating in 1975, Chen joined a local law firm, paying little attention to politics. At the time, Taiwan was still under martial law, ruled with an iron fist by the Nationalists who had fled from China in the 1940s but who still vowed to retake the mainland.

When the regime put a group of dissident protesters on trial for sedition in 1980, Chen was asked to be one of the defense lawyers. He ultimately accepted, encouraged by his wife, Wu Shu-jen, the daughter of a patrician family who told Chen’s official biographer that she had married him despite thinking him ‘a bore’ with ‘no sense of humor at all.’

The trial was Chen’s political epiphany. He lost the case in the Nationalist-controlled court, but the protesters’ ideals of home rule inspired him.

‘I became a believer,’ he said. ‘We should have two separate countries across the Taiwan Strait. . . . Taiwan is an independent sovereign nation.’

That ideal now bedevils him as a leader whom some find too extreme or too likely to push Taiwan into war with the mainland, which still considers the island a rebel province.

But it propelled Chen into politics as an anti-Nationalist, first as a muckraking member of Taipei’s City Council in 1981--where he was the youngest councilor ever--and later, in 1989, as an opposition legislator in the national assembly after martial law was finally lifted.

In between, a personal tragedy occurred that became a defining moment in Chen’s life. After losing a county election in 1985, he was speaking to supporters when a truck ran over his wife, leaving her a paraplegic.

Chen insists that it was a deliberate, politically motivated attack aimed at him, although the evidence is scant. The incident left him with a guilt that still haunts him and that some say made him work even harder as a form of atonement.

‘If you want to know my greatest failure,’ he told his official biographer, ‘it is my failure to protect my wife. . . . The consequence of my decision to become a political figure is that my wife has to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.’

A year later, Chen was thrown into jail for eight months after a Nationalist Party official sued him for libel in a case widely seen as politically motivated. After his release in 1987, the year that martial law was lifted, he joined the newly formed Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which enshrines Taiwanese independence as part of its platform.

His biggest triumph before Saturday’s presidential victory came in 1994, when he was elected mayor of Taipei, the Taiwanese capital.

As mayor, his critics say, the moralist in Chen emerged. He declared war on illegal buildings and on legalized prostitution, which he eventually outlawed.

His supporters credit him with improving the city’s infrastructure and reforming its bureaucracy.

His government included people he thought had talent, including members of the Nationalist Party. Analysts say he will have to do the same as president because his party is still in the minority in the legislature.

‘When he was mayor of Taipei, he drew people from different backgrounds and people he hadn’t even met. Those were people he tapped because of their abilities,’ said Chang, the DPP legislator.

He tried to recast himself as a more colorful character, dressing up as Superman and catering to youth by sponsoring citywide discos and concerts. Polls in the run-up to Saturday’s election showed Chen to be the top choice of voters younger than 30.

But Taipei residents kicked him out in 1998, a loss that shocked and tempered him. He reexamined his highhanded governing style and his overconfident campaign, lessons analysts say Chen applied to the presidential contest.

He moved to the center on issues such as relations with the mainland, retreating from his previous insistence on Taiwanese independence. His platform addressed everything from old-age pensions to first-time home-buying. He worked the crowds; many people began to sense newfound charisma.

Chen, who received 39% of the ballots, was the top vote-getter and thus winner of Saturday’s election--despite efforts by his rivals to paint him as an inexperienced, foolhardy radical unfit to occupy the president’s mansion.

‘He’s trying to find the Third Way. He’s not as unstable as his opponents say,’ said Iris Shaw, 21, a student at Chen’s alma mater. ‘And the DPP is more mature now, so we should give them a chance to [enact] their ideals.’