Meet Taiwan’s new president Lai Ching-te, a ‘severe danger’ for China

Taiwan's new President Lai Ching-te assumed the self-ruled island's highest office on Monday (May 20) after rising from a humble coal-mining town. President Lai now faces the challenge of combating falling birth rates in the island alongside widening rift with Xi Jinping's China. 

The 64-year-old Harvard graduate swept to the presidency in January's elections after promising that he will defend Taiwan's democracy while resisting Beijing's claims on the island.

In his inaugural speech, Lai called on Taiwanese to "come together to safeguard our nation" against China's threats to bring the island under its control.

"We must demonstrate our resolution to defend our nation," he said, warning Taiwan "must not harbour any delusions" about Beijing's goal. 

As the voting day of January 13, 2024 closed in, Beijing described the then presidential frontrunner Lai Ching-te a "severe danger" and claimed he would threaten peace by following the "evil path" of independence. 

Lai, who had once called himself a "pragmatic worker for Taiwan's independence", took a softer line on the issue on the campaign trail.

But he has vowed to continue his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen's policies of building up Taiwan's military capabilities as a deterrence against a potential invasion from China. 

Lai, however, has also made repeated overtures to resuming dialogue with China that severed in 2016.

Unlike most of Taipei City's political elite, Lai rose from a humble background.

Born in 1959, Lai was raised by his mother alongside five other siblings in a rural hamlet in New Taipei City, after his coal miner father died when he was a toddler.

He graduated in public health from the Harvard University after which he worked in a hospital in southern Taiwan before turning to politics in 1996 during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis.

"My defining moment came as China's military adventurism... threatened our shores with live fire exercises and missiles," he wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal last year.

"I decided I had a duty to participate in Taiwan's democracy and help protect this fledgling experiment from those who wished it harm."

He served as a lawmaker, a mayor of the southern city of Tainan and a premier before he was tapped to be vice president to Tsai.

Lai and Tsai belong to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has championed Taiwan's sovereignty.

Lai has stuck to Tsai's stance that Taiwan is "already independent", and does not need to formally declare itself separate from China.