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From Prison to Power

The Making of a Female Vice President in Taiwan

rom Prison to Power — That is the vivid title of a television documentary portraying the vicissitudes of a Chinese woman in Taiwan who started out her life as a nearly abandoned baby but ended up as the current vice president of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, the first-ever female to hold such an august position in Chinese history.

This 30-minute program, produced and distributed by HoustonPBS, also reflects the social change and democratization that have taken place in Taiwan in past decades and gives the viewer a better understanding of the prevailing situation across the Taiwan Strait. When it was premiered in Houston, From Prison to Power elicited high praise and favorable reviews from the cosmopolitan community of the city.

Vice President Annette Lu has made a colorful career for herself by roiling Taiwan’s political waters. She was the pioneer of the island’s feminist movement, spent five-and-a-half years in prison for advocating political change (during which she completed writing two novels), and was a founding member of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which ousted the deeply-entrenched Nationalist Party (the KMT, after 53 years of rule) in the March 2000 presidential election.

Born as the youngest daughter into a family of shopkeepers in Taoyuan, north Taiwan, on June 7, 1944, Annette Hsiu-lien Lu was almost given away for adoption twice during her childhood, but luck prevailed. As a teenager, she admired ROC’s founding father Dr. Sun Yat-sen for his farsightedness and innovative thinking, and loved reading Western books that depicted women standing firm and brave against all odds and turmoil.

After her graduation from the National Taiwan University, she continued her advanced studies in the United States, earning a Master’s degree in comparative law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and by doing further research at Harvard Law School. At 27, she decided to return home to serve her country and make the clarion call for new feminism in Taiwan so that every Taiwan woman would foster “self-consciousness, self-love, self-strength and self-independence.”

More important, Annette Lu realized that she must play politics or politics would play her, particularly after the U.S. severed its diplomatic relations with the ROC on Taiwan in January 1979 in favor of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. She became involved in political activities which landed her in jail on charges of sedition. After five years and four months of imprisonment, she was granted medical leave in March 1985 for treatment of thyroid cancer.

Since then, she has become even more engrossed in practical politics, using the then Democratic Progressive Party as her vehicle to attain her aspirations. There she collaborated closely with a fellow DPP leader named Chen Shui-bian, a dissident lawyer and one-time mayor of Taipei City, toward the creation of a “New Taiwan,” an action which infuriated the Chinese communist authorities in Beijing so deeply that Annette Lu was condemned as “the scum of the Chinese nation.”

On March 18, 2000, the Chen-Lu political platform was elected as the tenth-term president and vice president of the ROC at the open, national election. Their victory marks a change of the reins of power in Taiwan and a new page in Chinese history.