Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s Mr Democracy, to be given state funeral

Name: Obituary: Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, dies at age 97
Uploaded: 2020-07-31T13:10:36.000Z
Duration: 1 min 39 s
Description: Obituary: Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, dies at age 97

Tributes paid by Japan’s leader Shinzo Abe and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who says Lee ‘transformed Taiwan into beacon of democracy’

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen praises ‘his insistence on promoting democracy and his firm position on national sovereignty’

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Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s first popularly elected leader, who played a key role in the self-ruled island’s democratisation, died on Thursday. Photo: Kyodo

Lawrence Chung

Published: 9:10pm, 31 Jul 2020Updated: 11:36pm, 31 Jul 2020

Taiwan will hold a state funeral for its late president Lee Teng-hui, a controversial political figure lauded on the self-ruled island as “Mr Democracy” but condemned by mainland China during his tenure as a separatist who should be “tossed into the dustbin of history”.

Lee died at the age of 97 on Thursday after spending the previous five months in hospital in Taipei.

President Tsai Ing-wen, who has described Lee as her mentor, ordered that the late leader be given a state burial to mark his contribution to the democratisation of the island and upholding its sovereignty during his presidency between 1988 and 2000.

“In honour of the late president Lee … the president [Tsai] has decided to order that all government units and schools in Taiwan lower the national flag at half-staff for three days beginning noon today,” presidential spokesman Alex Huang said in a news conference in Taipei on Friday.

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Obituary: Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, dies at age 97

Tsai, leader of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has long referred to Lee as her mentor. In a Facebook post on Friday, she described working for Lee in the 1990s, when he asked her to draft the “special state-to-state” proposal for the relationship with Beijing.