Taiwan's Little Big Man

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A year into his term, he is still struggling, personally and politically, to find his voice. He has surrounded himself with a group of thirtysomething aides known as the "Boy Scouts." That has emboldened critics and possibly created a gap that even his enthusiasm can't bridge. "He freezes too many people out, even from his own party," complains former adviser turned political columnist Hu Chung-hsin. "He doesn't know how to make a deal." Chen has vowed to form a coalition with one of the two opposition parties after December's legislative elections. The challenge may be to find a partner. A year ago, Chen was able to bolt together a leadership team simply because he was Taiwan's pioneering, non-Kuomintang President, the first head of state not affiliated with Chiang Kai-shek's founding party. That novelty has worn off. He's the mainstream now.

They call him A-bian, a diminutive that can be traced to his boyhood in Hsi-chuang, a village 40 min. from Tainan, Taiwan's fourth largest city. This is the Taiwanese heartland, where kids still play marbles with pits of the dragon-eye fruit the way Chen did as a boy. They still go swimming in the creek and roast water chestnuts on charcoal braziers. His family's red-roofed Taiwanese house consisted of four rooms built around a courtyard and an open hearth. They used chalk to write on the charcoal-stained walls how much they owed neighbors and merchants. His father was a day laborer.

In Taiwan's rigorous academic meritocracy, good students are praised and respected; superior students become objects of local pride. A-bian was the finest student Tainan County had ever seen. "He was always the brightest in his classes," says Chen Chia-cheng, his sixth-grade teacher. "He used to finish his homework for the night before lunchtime." His classmates recall a studious, diminutive boy, annoyingly prim, his hand shooting up to provide correct answers to teachers' queries. The takeaway from his childhood successes: as long as you have boned up on whatever subject is at hand, you will succeed. That principle carried him through a successful career as a lawyer and eventually stints as a legislator and as mayor of Taipei. Despite Chen's success, the grasping of a social climber is also detectable in his tireless rise through the meritocracy. "What Chen lacks is emotional intelligence," says columnist Hu. "He doesn't have that. How can you be a great leader without that kind of emotional center?"

To reach out better, Chen says, he has reached in, seeking that emotional center. As examples of travails that built his character, he cites his 1986 prison stay for libel and a traffic accident--some say it was a politically motivated hit--that left his wife paralyzed.