Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said on Wednesday that the island would “not back down,” as an enraged China prepared for military drills in retaliation for US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s visit. Tsai hosted Pelosi on Wednesday, as China prepared for military exercises close to the island’s shores in retaliation for the visit.
Tsai was ranked as the ninth most powerful woman in the world by Forbes and the second-most influential person of 2020 after Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States.
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Tsai Ing-wen is a Taiwanese politician who has served as the Republic of China’s (Taiwan‘s) President since 2016.
Tsai, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, is Taiwan’s first female president. She has been the DPP’s chair since 2020, having previously served from 2008 to 2012 and 2014 to 2018.
Tsai grew up in Taipei, where she studied law and international trade before going on to become a law professor at Soochow University School of Law and National Chengchi University after receiving an LLB from National Taiwan University and an LLM from Cornell Law School.
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She later earned a PhD in law from the University of London after studying law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She was appointed to a series of governmental positions, including trade negotiator for WTO affairs, by the then-ruling party Kuomintang in 1993, and was one of the primary drafters of President Lee Teng-special hui’s state-to-state relations doctrine.
Tsai served as Minister of the Mainland Affairs Council during Chen Shui-first bian’s term as President.
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She was elected as DPP party chair after the DPP lost the presidential election in 2008, but she resigned when the party lost the presidential election in 2012.
In the 2010 municipal elections, Tsai ran for mayor of New Taipei City but lost to Eric Chu of the KMT. Tsai narrowly defeated her former boss, Su Tseng-chang, in the DPP primary in April 2011, becoming the first woman nominated by a major party as a presidential candidate in Taiwan’s history.
She lost to the incumbent president Ma Ying-jeou in the fifth presidential election in 2012, but she easily won her first term in office in the 2016 election. With a larger portion of the vote in the 2020 election, she was re-elected as president.