World Press Review - Annette Lu

From the September 2001 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 48, No. 9).

Annette Lu

Outspoken Outsider

Tekla Szymanski
World Press Review Associate Editor

The authorities in Beijing have called Taiwan’s vice president, Annette Lu, 57, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the “scum of the earth.” And many Taiwanese refer to her as an “IBM”—“international bigmouth.” Her rough working relationship with President Chen Shui-bian has always been food for the media, which eagerly recount each time it hits another low. While Lu, candid and outspoken (“I talk straight and always tell the truth”), is cold-shouldered by people close to the president, she continues to do things her way. She has been treated as an extraterrestrial, complains Lu. And more so now, since she has been accused of leaking Shui-bian’s rumored affair with his translator to the press.

For the first time ever, a Taiwanese vice president is filing a defamation and libel suit, which will force her to appear in court. According to the Taipei Times, Lu is claiming that someone close to the president instructed a magazine to publish stories to discredit her. That, in turn, provoked several legislators to draw parallels between Lu and the plight of the protagonist (played by Joan Allen) in the movie The Contender.

Lu was elected last year as the first female vice president in Taiwanese history after a long career of fighting for women’s rights. Determined and “a hopeless optimist,” according to Taipei’s magazine Sinorama—a KMT (Nationalist Party) magazine of the former ruling party and foe to the DPP—she studied law in Taipei and at Harvard, finishing at the top of her class.

In the 1970s, Lu opened a coffee shop for women in Taipei, a gathering place for advocates of the Taiwanese feminist movement that she founded. In 1979, she gave a provocative speech demanding democracy in Taiwan. She was charged with sedition, a capital crime, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. She wrote two novels on toilet paper before she was paroled five years later for health reasons. In 1992, when the DPP became a legitimate political party, she won a seat in Taiwan’s legislature. “I was born to fight injustice,” she told Paris’ L’Express. “I am very ambitious because I like to make ‘missions impossible’ possible!”