Kim Dae-jung

Kim Dae-jung was a South Korean politician, activist, and statesman who served as the eighth president of South Korea from 1998 to 2003. Originally an entrepreneur, he abandoned business and entered politics after the Korean War, becoming a member of the new wing of the Democratic Party. As an opposition politician he carried out a democratization movement against the military dictatorship from the Third Republic in the 1960s to the Fifth Republic in the 1980s, escaping death five times and spending six years in prison and ten years under house arrest and in exile. He ran unsuccessfully in presidential elections in 1971, 1987, and 1992, and in the 1997 election he defeated the Grand National Party candidate Lee Hoi-chang through an alliance with Kim Jong-pil and the Democratic Liberal Party, becoming the first opposition candidate to win the presidency.