Who Is Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s Next President? – The New York Times Feedzy

In 2014, when Lai Ching-te was a rising political star in Taiwan, he visited China and was quizzed in public about the most incendiary issue for leaders in Beijing: his party’s stance on the island’s independence.

His polite but firm response, people who know him say, was characteristic of the man who was on Saturday elected president and is now set to lead Taiwan for the next four years.

Mr. Lai was addressing professors at the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, an audience whose members, like many mainland Chinese, almost certainly believed that the island of Taiwan belongs to China.

Mr. Lai said that while his Democratic Progressive Party had historically argued for Taiwan’s independence — a position that China opposes — the party also believed that any change in the island’s status had to be decided by all its people. His party was merely reflecting, not dictating, opinion, he said. The party’s position “had been arrived at through a consensus in Taiwanese society,” Mr. Lai said.

To both his supporters and his opponents, the episode revealed Mr. Lai’s blunt, sometimes indignant sense of conviction, a key quality of this doctor-turned-politician who will take office in May, succeeding President Tsai Ing-wen.

“He makes clear-cut distinctions between good and evil,” said Pan Hsin-chuan, a Democratic Progressive Party official in Tainan, the southern city where Mr. Lai was mayor at the time of his 2014 visit to Fudan University. “He insists that right is right, and wrong is wrong.”