Foxconn's founder billionaire Terry Gou, on Monday, announced that he is running for president of Taiwan as an independent candidate. Foxconn is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics. Gou had sought the nomination of the main opposition Kuomintang party. But Kuomintang went with Hou Yu-ih, a former police chief who is now the mayor of New Taipei City.
Taiwan is due to hold elections in January 2024. Currently, Vice President Lai Ching-te, who is a member of President Tsai Ing-wen's Democratic Progressive Party, is the frontrunner.
Gou has for long nursed ambitions to lead the island nation that China claims is part of its territory. "I have decided to join the 2024 presidential race," Gou said, CNA reported. “Give me four years and I promise that I will bring 50 years of peace to the Taiwan Strait and build the deepest foundation for the mutual trust across the strait … Taiwan must not become Ukraine and I will not let Taiwan become the next Ukraine,” he told the Guardian.
In 2016 Gou joined the Kuomintang (KMT) party to run for president. He however lost the election and came in second in the Kuomintang primary. In 2019, he left the KMT. He also stepped down from Foxconn in 2019. Gou remains the firm's director.
Terry Gou was born on October 18, 1950 in Taipei. His family fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Chinese Civil War. Until age 24, Gou worked at a rubber factory and a medicine plant.
He has served as an anti-aircraft artillery officer at the Republic of China Air Force. He married Serena Lin and the couple had two children. Lin died at age 55-- she had breast cancer. He then married Delia Tseng, with whom he had three children.
Gou founded Foxconn in 1974 with $7,500 and a workforce of 10 elderly employees. The company started out by making plastic parts for television sets. He went on an 11-month trip across the US in the 1980s and expanded his business. In 1988 he opened his first factory in mainland China. Later, in the 1990s, his company snagged high-profile clients like Apple, HP and IBM. Reportedly, his current net worth is $7.4 billion.
Gou has said that the sea goddess Mazu, in a dream, 'instructed' him to run for president in 2020. Gou is known to be pro-China and has called for talks between Taiwan and China to be resumed under the one-China framework.
China, under Xi Jinping's leadership, has become more aggressive towards Taiwan. In recent years, Beijing has been sending more and more warplanes and ships into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ).
Attacking Tsai Ing-Wen's Democratic Progressive Party (DDP), Gou said, “In the past seven years, the situation in Taiwan has remained grim and its economy, defence and diplomacy have approached the edge of the cliff …. For this, we must pull the DPP off the shelf,” SCMP reported. He also said that the opposition camp needed to unite to overturn DDP's hold on power.
