Lee Huan - Political Career

Political Career

In 1972, Lee Huan was appointed as Director General of the Department of Organization for the Kuomintang (KMT) when Chiang Ching-kuo was Premier. In 1976, then-Premier Chiang Ching-kuo instructed Lee Huan to select several dozen young party leaders for the highest level cadre training program at the party school. Among the 60 individuals chosen for the training, half were Taiwanese, including Lien Chan (a member of the KMT’s Central Standing Committee member and Minister of Foreign Affairs), Wu Po-hsiung (a CSC member and Mayor of Taipei), Shih Ch’iyang (a CSC member and Vice Premier). This opening of the KMT’s cadre program was an unprecedented opening for native Taiwanese, and was an important step in Chiang Ching-kuo’s program of loosening mainlander control of the KMT by integrating native Taiwanese into its leadership.

In 1977, several thousand anti-KMT demonstrators led by Hsu Hsin-liang rallied in the town of Chung-li to protest the use of paper ballots in the upcoming elections, for fear that the KMT would use the ballots to rig the election. When the protesters realized that the KMT had likely carried out the fraud that they had feared, they rioted, ultimately burning down the Chung-li police station. The riot – the first such large-scale protest in Taiwan since 1947 – was subsequently called the Zhongli incident. Taking responsibility for the incident, Lee Huan tendered his resignation, offering no other explanation than to state "The election in 1977 didn't meet my expectations, so I resigned."

After his resignation, he became the president of CTV until 1979. That year he became president of National Sun Yat-sen University. In 1984, he was appointed Minister of Education. In his three years as Education Minister, he abolished restrictions on students' hair length, enabled the establishment of private colleges, established a college of physical education, increased scholarships for graduate students, and established the University Publications Committee.