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Reviewed by:
  • Lee Teng-hui and Taiwan’s Quest for Identity, and: Taiwan’s Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia
  • Murray A. Rubinstein
Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, Lee Teng-hui and Taiwan’s Quest for Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Richard C. Kagan, Taiwan’s Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007. 231 pp.

Lee Teng-hui, a tall, stately, scholarly, and politically astute Hakka from northwestern Taiwan has constructed an important place for himself at the center of Taiwan’s transition to democracy and, in doing so, has transformed the very nature of the political system of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan.

Lee was the president of Taiwan from 1988 to 2000. When his formal political career ended, he did not move into the limelight but remained as a player, providing support for the members of the Taiwanese-dominated Democratic Progressive Party, the rival to his own Kuomintang (KMT), which had taken the presidency from his designated successor. As the years went on, he moved into the background and let [End Page 250] Chen Shun-bian hold center stage and run the party and government as he thought best. Chen’s best was not nearly enough, however, and the hopes of Lee and many millions of DPP members were dashed when Chen proved to be a weak and inept national leader.

What President Lee lacked, he seems to have felt, was recognition from those outside Taiwan. He was a Cornell-trained Ph.D. and a man always involved in the study of philosophy and religion. A committed Protestant and visible member of the powerful and influential Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, he had a vision of Taiwan as a “city on a hill” and of himself as a sort of Moses, a theme that can be found as a subtext in many of his more personal, self-reflective, and philosophical speeches and articles. In recent years Lee has begun to open himself up to the larger public, both in his philosophical quasi-memoir and in the numerous frank and detailed conversations he has held with his biographers, Shih-Shan Henry Tsai and Richard C. Kagan.

Both books offer impressive, insightful portraits of Lee. Of the two, Tsai’s is more elegantly written. A Taiwanese-born historian affiliated with the University of Arkansas and the Institute of Taiwan of Academia Sinica (a large-scale academic think tank that is the center of intellectual life on Taiwan), Tsai has written numerous important books and articles on the Ming Dynasty, most notably the well-reviewed Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), and The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (New York: SUNY Press, 1995). His most recent work, to be published by Cornell University Press, deals with Taiwan and the larger world from Ming times to the present. Tsai’s biography of Lee places the ROC leader within the larger context of Taiwan’s 400-year-long history, giving a complete picture of Lee and the Taiwan he labored to transform., readers would do well to read Tsai and Kagan reflect different backgrounds, disciplines, and approaches to Lee and the world he helped to mold. The two works thus complement each other, giving us a more comprehensive understanding of this important albeit not-so-well-known East Asian leader.

Tsai places Lee within the larger contexts of Taiwan’s history. He begins with parallel narratives that merge as Lee rises in influence and power within the ROC government led by Chiang Ching-kuo. The middle and later chapters of the book chart Lee, now seen as being one with his nation, as he determines its complex domestic policies—policies that must take into account the tensions produced by a successful socioeconomic revolution, the struggles of the island’s ethnic groups for power, the country’s difficult-to-chart foreign policies, and Taiwan’s relationship with its larger and more powerful neighbor to the west, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Kagan is a political scientist and both a Taiwan watcher and an activist in...

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