Tsai Ing-wen: former professor on course to be most powerful woman in Chinese-speaking world

For weeks “Little Ing” has crisscrossed her homeland in a bid to become the most powerful woman in the Chinese-speaking world.

She has picked her way through screaming crowds, addressed heaving political rallies and repeatedly punched her fist into the air while urging voters on with the cry: “Light up Taiwan!”

But those who know Tsai Ing-wen, the softly spoken London School of Economics graduate who is on the verge of becoming Taiwan’s first female president, say that for all her hours on the campaign trail she is far more at home swotting up on policy in the company of her two cats, Think Think and Ah-Tsai.

“I sense that politics certainly doesn’t come naturally to her,” says J Michael Cole, a Taipei-based academic who has known the presidential frontrunner since 2008.

“She very much enjoys sitting down with a glass of red wine, and reading a book and spending quality time with her cats.”

There will be scant time for such pleasures after Saturday, when Taiwan’s 18 million voters head to the polls to elect a new president and legislature.

Tsai, the 59-year-old candidate for the Democratic Progressive party (DPP), is widely tipped to win, bringing the curtain down on the eight-year rule of Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) party president, Ma Ying-jeou.

“If she didn’t win I would be beyond shocked,” says Nathan Batto, a political scientist from Taipei’s Academia Sinica.

Batto believes a Tsai victory would represent a “repudiation” of Ma Ying-jeou’s two terms, which have seen an unprecedented rapprochement with China – including a historic summit in Singapore with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, last November – but also growing dissatisfaction at the perceived failure of those ties to improve Taiwanese lives.

Taiwan’s economy grew by a meagre 1% last year despite Ma’s guarantees that his pro-China policies would deliver real benefits to the 23 million citizens of the self-ruled island, which Beijing still considers a renegade province.

“There are many people who are very, very disappointed with the economic benefits that were promised and haven’t materialised,” Batto says. “[Ma] famously promised 6, 3, 3: 6% growth, 3% unemployment and $30,000 per capita income. Now the DPP is saying what we got was: 1, 4, 3.”

Tsai Ing-wen, the woman now hoping to change that, was born in 1956, seven years after Mao Zedong’s communist troops took Beijing and forced Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists to flee across the Taiwan Strait.

One of nine children, she was initially raised in Fenggang, a village in the southern county of Pingtung, but later moved to the capital where she spent her teens growing up in downtown Taipei.

In an interview with Time magazine in 2015, Tsai recalled how, as the youngest daughter, she was required to spend her idle hours caring for her entrepreneur father. “I was not considered a kid that would be successful in my career,” she said.

Tsai quickly set about confounding those expectations. She earned a law degree from Taipei’s National Taiwan University and headed east to Cornell University in New York for a masters. The Big Apple seemed like a good place for a young woman yearning for “a revolutionary life”, she told Time.

After Cornell, Tsai made for London, enrolling at the LSE where she gained a PhD in law. That spell in London left her with not only a “quirky little British accent” but also an international perspective that many of her predecessors in the DPP leadership lacked, says Cole.

“She is certainly a lot more worldly than previous leaders of the party.”

Gerrit van der Wees, a Taiwan expert who has spent time with Tsai during her frequent trips to the United States, says she likes to compare herself to Angela Merkel, “[who is] also a very decisive person, a person who has an open government, who is in favour of an open society.”

“The fact that Angela Merkel opened the borders to the Syrian refugees was something that Tsai commented on as being a very courageous and positive step that she would take too,” he said. “I think there are many good [similarities] there.”

After leaving London in 1984, Tsai returned to Taiwan to take up a series of teaching positions at universities in the city where she was raised.

By the early 90s she had gone into government, working as a key trade negotiator involved in Taiwan’s in entry into the World Trade Organisation, and then as a national security adviser to the KMT president Lee Teng-hui.

When DPP leader Chen Shui-bian took over from Lee, in 2000, Tsai was given the thorny task of leading the Mainland Affairs Council, which handles relations with China.

A leaked US diplomatic cable, written in 2006, shows Tsai the technocrat built a reputation as “a tenacious negotiator” and “a savvy insider” with “impressive economic experience”. “Tsai is viewed as extremely capable and very persuasive,” it said.

A second diplomatic dispatch, penned in 2008 by Stephen M Young, now the United States’ consul general in Hong Kong, foresaw the political rise of the “thoughtful” Taiwanese politician.

“Tsai’s moderate and soft spoken personality, as well as her academic and professional qualifications, will appeal to those in the centre of Taiwan’s political spectrum in a way that more strident DPP politicians do not,” Young wrote.

“Her low-key personality may also disarm her competitors, who would do well not to underestimate [her].”

Despite now standing on the cusp of becoming one of the world’s most powerful women, Tsai was a latecomer to political life, only joining the DPP in 2004.

“She is more thoughtful scholar than slogan-shouting politico,” noted a 2012 profile.

But allies say her impact on the party was profound. Supporters credit her with transforming the DPP after its bruising election defeat in 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou’s victory ushered in eight years in which Taiwan swung dramatically towards Beijing.

“A lot of people here were of the opinion that it was over for the DPP [in 2008],” recalls Cole. “They were financially broke, [outgoing] president Chen [Shui-bian] was facing allegations of corruption and they had gotten trounced in the elections by Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT.”

“She arrived at the right time and very quickly was able to rehabilitate the DPP and make it once again a viable party within a matter of two or three years.”

Tsai’s first bid for a top political job came in 2010 when she narrowly missed out on becoming mayor of New Taipei City. Two years later, in 2012, she ran for president, but again lost out, conceding defeat by telling supporters: “To all the dear people of Taiwan: one day we will come back and we will not give up.”

Cole, who has worked for Tsai’s Thinking Taiwan Foundation since 2014, says his employer considered throwing in the towel after that defeat. “I know that it took her quite a while, in 2012, to decide whether she would go back to politics or just stay with the Foundation and continue to organise academic conferences and all that.”

But Cole says he saw in his employer “a sense of calling, a sense of responsibility, a sense that things were probably not going in the right direction both within the DPP and within Taiwan and that she would have the ability to play a role in turning things around.”

With Tsai boasting a double-digital lead in opinion polls, that bid to turn things around is likely to begin on Saturday.

She has vowed to boost the island’s struggling economy by diversifying trade relations and pledged to tackle youth unemployment and a growing wealth gap.

The introverted scholar will also seek to reshape relations with Beijing although she has promised to uphold the uneasy status quo between democratic Taiwan and one-party China.

“She has a very strong sense of Taiwan’s rightful place, as she sees it, in the international community, and that rightful place is now being undermined by what Ma Ying-jeou has been trying to do over the past few years, pushing Taiwan closer to China,” says van der Wees. “So she wants to push that more in the right direction.”

That, coupled with the possibility of the traditionally pro-independence DPP winning control over Taiwan’s legislature, has China’s Communist leaders on edge.

“For all Tsai’s moderation – which Beijing hears, but doesn’t buy – there is deep suspicion about her intentions,” said Jon Sullivan, a Taiwan expert from the University of Nottingham.

But in the wake of Taiwan’s Sunflower movement protests such promises have struck a chord, as has the low-profile persona of the Angela Merkel of the East.

“She is not a great speaker. She’s not a particularly dashing figure,” says Batto. “She just seems to be a hard-worker and very well prepared and sincere. It might be that what is needed right now is not a charismatic saviour but just a competent person with pretty good leadership skills.”