Koo Chen-fu

Family and Early Life

Koo Chen-fu was born in 1917, the son of Koo Hsien-jung, a prominent Taiwanese businessman of the Japanese colonial era. He graduated in political science from Taihoku Imperial University (now National Taiwan University) in 1940. After Taiwan's retrocession he was imprisoned for a year and a half over his involvement in the "Taiwan Autonomy Committee affair" (also called the "Taiwan independence affair"); on his release he lived in Hong Kong with his wife for three years before returning to Taiwan to run the family business. His second wife, Cecilia Koo (Yen Cho-yun), a granddaughter of Yan Fu, married him in 1949.

Businessman and Private Diplomat

During the land reform of the 1950s Koo, a major landowner, exchanged land for shares in state enterprises and rose at Taiwan Cement from assistant manager to general manager and chairman. In 1961 the government asked him to organise the Taiwan Stock Exchange; he later became the first Taiwan-born chairman of the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce, and in 1966 founded the China Securities Investment Corporation (later CTBC). According to the scholar Zhou Wengang, after Japan cut diplomatic ties with Taipei in 1972 Koo used contacts inherited from his father to broker the creation of the Association of East Asian Relations, preserving a channel between Taiwan and Japan. Holding party and government titles as well, he was known as a "red-hatted merchant".

Chairman of the SEF

From 1991 Koo chaired the Straits Exchange Foundation. In April 1993, aged 76, he held talks with the 78-year-old ARATS president Wang Daohan in Singapore and signed four agreements; the joint agreement described the talks as "non-governmental, economic, administrative and functional". Tang Shubei recalled that Koo had sung Peking opera since childhood — singing twice a week was, he said, his secret to staying fit — and that the two men opened their first meeting by talking about it. From 1995 Koo attended the APEC leaders' meeting four times as the President's special envoy.

In October 1998 Koo visited the mainland and met Wang in Shanghai, arranging for Wang to visit Taiwan the following year, a visit that never happened after contacts broke down in 1999. According to Zhou Zhihuai, Koo said at the meeting that "we have not given up on unification". At the tenth anniversary of the talks in 2003, he said that precisely because the two sides had political differences, they needed to keep talking on the basis of respect for each other's views.

Death

Koo died of kidney failure in Taipei early on 3 January 2005. ARATS vice president Sun Yafu and secretary-general Li Yafei came to Taipei to pay respects on Wang Daohan's behalf. At the memorial service, President Chen Shui-bian said that seeking consensus was the spirit of the 1993 talks and Koo's most precious legacy to people on both sides of the Strait, recalling that what had most preoccupied Koo was not being able to meet Wang again; alluding to Koo's love of Peking opera, he likened the cross-strait impasse to a drama on stage, saying the question was whether the two sides' leaders would have the wisdom to resolve their differences and, in Koo's words, "leave the audience impressed when they leave the stage". According to Zhou Zhihuai, Wang once said of Koo that "he worked to bring about one China, and this we recognise".