Lung Ying-tai

Lung Ying-tai (Chinese: 龍應台; pinyin: Lóng Yìngtái; born 13 February 1952 in Kaohsiung) is a Taiwanese essayist and cultural critic. She occasionally writes under the pen name 'Hu Meili' (胡美麗; 胡美丽; Hú Měilì). Lung's poignant and critical essays contributed to the democratization of Taiwan and as the only Taiwanese writer with a column in major mainland Chinese newspapers, she is an influential writer in Mainland China. She has written 17 books.

Lung Ying-tai has held two positions within Taiwan's government as Taipei's first Cultural Bureau Chief (1999–2003) and as Taiwan's first Culture Minister (2012–2014).

Lung's father, Lung Huai-sheng (龍槐生), a Kuomintang military police officer, moved his family to Taiwan after the KMT lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949. She is her parents' second child and has four brothers. The first character of Lung's given name, ying (應), is her mother's family name (應美君 Ying Mei-jun), and the second character, tai (台), is to signify that she is the first child in the family to be born in Taiwan.

After attending National Tainan Girls' Senior High School, Lung received her bachelor's degree in Foreign Language and Literature from the National Cheng Kung University and a PhD from Kansas State University in English and American Literature.

After returning to Taiwan, she began writing an op-ed column in China Times on the various conditions in Taiwan. Her essays were published together in 1985 in a book of social-political criticism, "The Wild Fire," (Ye Huo Ji 野火集) when Taiwan was still under the Kuomintang's one-party rule, which cemented her role as an intellectual in Taiwan. She moved to Germany in 1987, partly due to the response to her work that included death threats. Her translated essays had appeared in European newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her work has appeared in mainland Chinese newspapers since the early 1990s. Her essays include "Children Take Your Time," "Silver Cactus", "Rise of thinking," and in 2006, "Please Use Civilization to Convince Me", an open letter to Hu Jintao following the temporary closure of Freezing Point. She criticised Singaporean minister Lee Kuan Yew and the government's restrictions on personal freedom in 1994 in an article titled, "Thank God I Am Not Singaporean".

She returned to Taiwan to become the first Director of the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Taipei in September 1999, and her policies increased the visibility of the arts in Taipei during her four-year term. She resigned in March 2003 to return to writing, noting that "being an official is suffocating. I could hardly breathe."

She joined the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong in August 2004. In July 2005, she established the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation and used the foundation as a platform to sponsor literary and artistic endeavours as well as academic lectures. In 2007, Lung was offered a position on the seat on the Control Yuan which she refused. Since 2008 Lung Ying-tai has undertaken the position of Hung Leung Hao Ling Distinguished Fellow in Humanities of University of Hong Kong and Chair Professor of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. She received the 2009 K.T. Li Chair Professor Award from NCKU.

Her 2009 book "Da Jiang Da Hai 1949" (Big River, Big Sea) is about the 1949 civil war and the escape to Taiwan of supporters of the Kuomintang. It sold over 100,000 copies in Taiwan and 10,000 in Hong Kong in its first month of release, but discussion of her work was banned in mainland China following the book launch.

In 2009, her book "Watching You Go"(Musong目送) was published . This book is popular in Asia once it published.

Upon the creation of the Ministry of Culture in May 2012 she became the first Minister of Culture of Taiwan.

Lung was inaugurated as Minister of Culture on 21 May 2012, stating a desire that the ministry be independent of political influence. During her 2-year, 7-month tenure, she made statements or announced initiatives on reading, TV culture, and cross-strait exchanges. On 1 December 2014, Lung tendered her resignation from the ministerial post citing her aging mother as the main reason, with political and media hostility as contributing factors.

After moving to Germany in the late 1980s, she married a German man with whom she has two sons. She was also known as Ying-tai Walther. They were eventually divorced. One of Lung's books, Dear Andreas (《親愛的安德烈》), is a collection of letters and e-mails between her and her older son.