Lai, who has been vice president since 2020, was confirmed Taiwan’s next president just before 8pm local time Saturday, after Hou Yu-ih, the candidate from the opposition Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, conceded in a speech.
The 64-year-old Harvard-educated former doctor, who also goes by William, will take office in May, extending the eight-year rule of his party for an unprecedented third term.
Internationally, Lai’s presidency will likely be judged by how well he manages an increasingly bellicose Beijing and whether he can avert a major crisis in the region.
The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan but claims the self-governing island of 23 million as part of its territory and regularly threatens to take control by force if Taipei ever formally rules out “unification.”
Xi Jinping, the strongman leader of China who promotes grand narratives of national “rejuvenation,” has dramatically escalated military activity around Taiwan in recent years and ruled unification an “inevitability.”
In the campaign, Lai cast himself as the safe and familiar choice to fend off Hou, who advocated compromise with Beijing to ease tensions. He repeatedly promised to continue the approach of President Tsai Ing-wen, who is stepping down having fulfilled a two-term limit, underscoring how influential his predecessor has been in shaping Taiwan’s defense and foreign policy debate.
Like Tsai, Lai maintains he is open to talking with Xi but only as equals. He has urged Beijing to rethink the pressure tactics but says he “harbors no illusions” about its intentions.
Instead of trying to please Beijing, Lai has said he will focus on securing Taiwan’s global status by strengthening ties with United States and other friendly democracies. He wants to continue military reforms, protect politics from interference and secure the economy from coercion.
Beijing has made abundantly clear its dislike of Lai. Chinese officials consider him a “separatist” for his views on Taiwan’s sovereignty and has said he would bring “severe danger” to cross-strait relations.
“The Chinese Communist Party leadership will definitely say that Lai is worse than Tsai,” said Shelley Rigger, an expert on Taiwanese politics at Davidson College.
China’s leaders are wedded to a strategy of “perpetual escalation,” she said, and “for them to acknowledge that any DPP leader is not an existential threat would feel like stepping back from commitments they made.”
China’s military pressure campaign has fueled concerns of miscalculation that could spark conflict and draw in the United States. Analysts are watching closely to see if Beijing responds to Lai’s victory with large-scale drills that could send tensions spiraling.
Experts on Taiwanese politics fear Beijing has long ago made up its mind about Lai, despite his efforts to distance himself from his past advocacy for formal independence.
Taiwan exists in a kind of gray zone — it has its own government, its own passport and its own distinct identity. But because of objections from China, it has diplomatic relations with only 13 countries and doesn’t have a formal seat at the United Nations or other international bodies. Many governments, including the United States, however, maintain robust unofficial ties with Taipei.
It has enjoyed de facto sovereignty for 75 years without pushing for the outright separation that Beijing strongly objects to.
Unlike Tsai, who was a career bureaucrat and international trade negotiator originally considered an outsider by many in the DPP, Lai rose to prominence in the days when the party openly supported Taiwan’s formal independence.
‘Pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence’
Lai’s political career began and took off in Tainan, a seaside city in south Taiwan that has long been a stronghold for the party.
As a young lawmaker and then the popular mayor of Tainan from 2010 to 2017, Lai became a prominent figure in the party’s “new tide” faction that once pushed for a clause on Taiwan independence to be included in the party charter.
When appointed premier in 2017, he described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence” and that he would always hold that goal.
Through the campaign, his past statements have been used by Beijing and the main opposition party Kuomintang to claim he will upend the fragile agreements between Beijing, Taipei and Washington that for decades kept the peace.
But his supporters say these critics misread Lai’s stance by focusing on the “independence” part of that formulation. “He was just saying that he is a very pragmatic person and views cross-strait relations in a pragmatic way,” said Yeh Tse-shan, deputy mayor of Tainan, who worked alongside Lai for seven years there.
On the campaign trail, Lai stressed that he has no plan to declare independence. Taiwan, he says, is already sovereign under its official name, the Republic of China, and there is no need to formalize the separation and risk a Chinese invasion.
Beijing — and, to a lesser extent, Washington — might be concerned about Lai’s early advocacy, but he isn’t seen as likely to push the envelope among the elders of the hardcore Taiwan independence movement.
The DPP has “changed from an organization leading political reforms to an election machine,” said Yao Chia-wen, chairman of the party from 1987 to 1988. “Those in office don’t want to cause trouble. Neither will Lai,” he said.
Even if younger generations increasingly identify as Taiwanese — not Chinese — and take democratic freedoms as a given, the overwhelming majority support “maintaining the status quo” when it comes to relations with Beijing, surveys show.
Some analysts worry Lai will lack the discipline Tsai demonstrated when talking about relations with Beijing.
“One of the things that helped Tsai a lot was her extreme steadiness,” but Lai’s background in political campaigning makes him “more of a talker” and could undermine his ability to stay on message, said Rigger.
A history of challenging authoritarian regimes
Born in a poor neighborhood of New Taipei City, Lai’s life began with tragedy. The youngest of five children, his father died in a mining accident when he was three months old.
After attending the prestigious National Taiwan University and moving to Tainan to become a doctor, he was caught up in the intellectual ferment of the 1990s, a heady time in Taiwanese politics that close associates say left him with a quiet determination to challenge perceived injustices.
The Kuomintang had ruled Taiwan as a one-party state for four decades after losing the Chinese civil war to the Communists and fleeing to the island in 1949. When martial law ended in 1987, the democracy movement took off, and Lai decided he couldn’t sit on the sidelines.
“Intellectuals at that time were passionate about overthrowing the Kuomintang’s authoritarian system,” said Lu Wei-yin, a Tainan city councilor who worked with Lai in the 2000s.
Early on, Lai was idealistic and quite serious about his work. Close associates from his Tainan days describe him as solemn and focused on the minutia of policies.
He almost always wore a suit and would call out colleagues for underdressing. The only time he really seemed to relax was when talking about his — and arguably Taiwan’s — favorite sport: Baseball.
Despite being softly spoken, he didn’t shy away from fights as a young lawmaker. In 2005, when the Kuomintang blocked his party’s proposal for Taiwan to buy more weapons from the United States, Lai was filmed hurling insults on the floor of parliament.
“When he thinks something isn’t right, he has to do something,” Lu said.
That need to remonstrate has occasionally landed Lai in hot water. In 2014, on his first trip to China, he caused a stir by openly defending his party’s position on Taiwan independence to his Chinese hosts.
A Chinese scholar suggested the DPP freeze the Taiwan independence clause in the party charter to facilitate talks with Beijing — a proposal resurfaced in recent months by the Kuomintang and prominent American academics.
His party didn’t create the desire for separation from China, Lai replied, and suspending the clause wouldn’t help Beijing resolve the core reason Taiwanese don’t want to be ruled by Beijing. “Support for Taiwan independence in society came first,” he said, “then came the DPP.”
