page_title: Lee Teng-hui
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Lee Teng-hui / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Lee Teng-hui,He was dressed in Japanese kimono, He practiced kendo. 日本語: 着物を着て剣道の練習をする、中学時代の李登輝 中文: 中學時候，身穿和服，練習劍道的李登輝。
context_page_description: Lee Teng-hui was a Taiwanese statesman and economist who was the fourth president of the Republic of China under the 1947 Constitution and chairman of the Kuomintang from 1988 to 2000. He was the first president of the Republic of China to be born in Taiwan and the first to be directly elected. During his presidency, Lee oversaw the end of martial law and the full democratization of the ROC, advocated the Taiwanese localization movement, and led an ambitious foreign policy to gain allies around the world. Nicknamed "Mr. Democracy", Lee was credited as the president who initiated Taiwan's transition to the democratic era.
  After leaving office, remained active in Taiwanese politics. Lee was considered the "spiritual leader" of the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union, and recruited for the party in the past. After Lee campaigned for TSU candidates in the 2001 Taiwanese legislative election, he was expelled by KMT. Other activities that Lee engaged in included maintaining relations with former Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian and Japan.
context_section_description: Lee was born in the rural farming community of Sanshi Village, Taihoku Prefecture, Japanese Taiwan. As a child, he often dreamed of traveling abroad, and became an avid stamp collector. Growing up under Japanese colonial rule, he developed a strong interest for Japan. His father was a middle-level Japanese police aide, and his brother, Lee Teng-chin joined the colony's police academy and soon volunteered for the Imperial Japanese Navy and died in Manila. Lee—one of only four Taiwanese students in his Taihoku High School class—graduated with honors and was given a scholarship to Japan's Kyoto Imperial University.
  During his school days, he learned kendo and bushido. A lifelong collector of books, Lee was heavily influenced by Japanese thinkers like Nitobe Inazō and Kitaro Nishida in Kyoto. In 1944 he too volunteered for service in the Imperial Japanese Army and became a second lieutenant, in command of an anti-aircraft gun in Taiwan. He was ordered back to Japan in 1945 and participated in the clean-up after the great Tokyo firebombing of March 1945. Lee stayed in Japan after the surrender and graduated from Kyoto Imperial University in 1946.
  After World War II ended, and the Republic of China took over Taiwan, Lee enrolled in the National Taiwan University, where in 1948 he earned a bachelor's degree in agricultural science. Lee joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) for two stints, in September 1946 and October or November 1947, both times briefly. Lee began the New Democracy Association with four others. This group was absorbed by the CPC, and Lee officially left the party in September 1948. In a 2002 interview Lee himself admitted that he had been a Communist. In that same interview Lee said that he had strongly opposed Communism for a long time because he understood the theory well and knew that it was doomed to fail. Lee stated that he joined the Communists out of hatred for the KMT.
  In 1953, Lee received a master's degree in agricultural economics from the Iowa State University (ISU) in the United States. Lee returned to Taiwan in 1957 as an economist with the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), an organization sponsored by the U.S. which aimed at modernizing Taiwan's agricultural system and at land reform. During this period, he also worked as an adjunct professor in the Department of Economics at National Taiwan University and taught at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at National Chengchi University.
  In the mid-1960s Lee returned to the United States, and earned a PhD in agricultural economics from Cornell University in 1968. His advisor was John Williams Mellor. His doctoral dissertation, Intersectoral Capital Flows in the Economic Development of Taiwan, 1895–1960  (published as a book under the same name) was honored as the year's best doctoral thesis by the American Association of Agricultural Economics and remains an influential work on Taiwan's economy during the Japanese and early KMT periods.
  Lee encountered Christianity as a young man and in 1961 was baptised. For most of the rest of his political career, despite holding high office, Lee made a habit of giving sermons at churches around Taiwan, mostly on apolitical themes of service and humility. He was a member of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan.
  Lee spoke Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Hokkien, English, and Japanese. It has been claimed that he was more proficient in Japanese than he was in Mandarin.
caption: Lee Teng-hui, junior high school student days wearing kendo armor[3]
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