Ma Ying-jeou

Early Life and Education

Ma Ying-jeou was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a family from Hengshan, Hunan, and moved to Taiwan with his family when he was just over a year old. He graduated in law from National Taiwan University and went on to earn an LL.M. from New York University and an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Early Career

Returning to Taiwan in 1981, Ma served as deputy director-general of the First Bureau of the Presidential Office and as English secretary to President Chiang Ching-kuo, working on the staff side of the lifting of martial law and the opening of family visits to the mainland. In 1988 he became chairman of the Executive Yuan's Research, Development and Evaluation Commission and executive secretary of its mainland affairs task force, helping draft the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area and set up the Mainland Affairs Council and the Straits Exchange Foundation. In 1991 he became deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council and was elected to the Second National Assembly, taking part in drafting the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China. In 1993 he was appointed Minister of Justice.

Taipei Mayor and KMT Chairman

In December 1998 Ma was elected mayor of Taipei with 766,377 votes (51.1%), and he was re-elected in 2002 with 873,102 votes (64.1%), serving until December 2006. In 2005 he was elected chairman of the Kuomintang (KMT). In 2006 he was accused of misusing his special allowance as Taipei mayor; on 13 February 2007, the day he was indicted, he resigned as party chairman and announced his presidential bid. On 24 April 2008 the Supreme Court ruled him not guilty, making the verdict final.

Presidency

On 22 March 2008 Ma was elected the 12th-term President of the Republic of China with about 7.65 million votes (58.4%), taking office on 20 May in Taiwan's second transfer of power between parties; on 14 January 2012 he was re-elected with about 6.89 million votes (51.6%). He also served as KMT chairman from October 2009, resigning on 3 December 2014 after the party's heavy defeat in local elections at the end of November.

On cross-strait policy, Ma sought to maintain a status quo of "no unification, no independence and no use of force" under the framework of the ROC Constitution, on the basis of the "1992 Consensus" with "respective interpretations". During his presidency the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits resumed talks in 2008, direct flights began, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) was signed in 2010, and the two sides signed 23 agreements in all; in February 2014 the heads of the two sides' cross-strait affairs departments met for the first time. In 2014 the Sunflower Movement against the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement prevented its passage in the Legislative Yuan. On 7 November 2015 he met Xi Jinping in Singapore, the first meeting between leaders of the two sides since 1949.

After Leaving Office

After stepping down on 20 May 2016, Ma was indicted in several further cases. In a case over leaking confidential information, indicted in 2017, an appeals court at one stage sentenced him to four months, but the retrial court upheld his acquittal on 12 July 2019, ending the case. In a case over the KMT's sale of media assets and its former headquarters, he was acquitted at first instance in October 2021. From 27 March to 7 April 2023 he led Taiwanese students on a visit to the mainland and paid respects at his ancestral home in Xiangtan, Hunan — the first former Taiwanese leader to visit the mainland since the two sides came under separate rule in 1949. On 10 April 2024 he met Xi Jinping again, in Beijing. On the tenth anniversary of the Singapore meeting in 2025 he issued a statement criticising the DPP government's "Resist China, Protect Taiwan" policy and calling for a return to the foundation laid at the meeting.