Taiwan's first elected female vice president, Annette Lu, is credited with starting that country's women's movement and spent five and a half years in jail as a political prisoner while battling cancer. This article is based on an exclusive interview obtained by PNS correspondent Richard Mercier, and looks at her role in the administration of President-elect Chen Shui-bian. Mercier ./ . .

TAIPEI -- On the night she was elected Taiwan's first female vice president, Annette Lu called her party's success a victory for "the forces of hope" over the "forces of fear and intimidation."

She might easily have been speaking of her own personal journey. Born into a poor family, Lu's parents considered selling her when she was three. "There was a practice of selling daughters," she says. "Families that did this wouldn't have to pay a dowry."

But, she goes on, "When my parents agreed to sell me, my elder sister and brother were so scared they hid me in my aunt's house."

Her parents finally backed out of the deal. "Later they felt sorry and they began to educate me so that eventually I could become a politician," she says wryly.

But Lu, now 55, took no ordinary path to electoral politics. Before she was first elected to office in 1992, she spent more than two decades in the public spotlight, sparking the women's movement in Taiwan, joining those opposed to martial law, and languishing in jail.

In the early 1970s, Lu she wrote a series of articles for Taiwan newspapers that almost single-handedly launched the feminist movement in the conservative, Confucian culture.

She was jarred into action, she says, by two events. First, " the government was debating how to prevent women from entering college. They considered that a waste of education."

Second, a Taiwanese graduate student in the United States, suspected of killing his wife because he believed she was having an affair, fled to Taiwan where there was widespread sympathy for him. "They said the wife shouldn't have been unfaithful to the husband," Lu recalls. "So I wrote my articles, criticizing sexual morality."

Lu started resource centers and crisis hotlines for women. In the mid-1970s, feeling stifled in Taiwan, she headed off to Harvard, where she earned a law degree.

Returning to Taiwan in 1978, Lu joined the opposition movement and was selected secretary of a union that promoted dissident political candidates and assistant publisher of Formosa magazine, the major voice of democracy and Taiwan independence advocates.

On International Human Rights Day in 1979, the magazine organized a rally in Kaohsiung, the country's second-largest city. It is widely believed that Nationalist provocateurs infiltrated the rally and incited violence. The government arrested Lu -- who delivered a speech -- and seven others on charges of sedition.

The defense team included a 29-year-old maritime lawyer -- pressured into accepting the case by his wife -- named Chen Shui-bian. For him, and many other Taiwanese, the trial was a political epiphany.

That the dissidents would be convicted was a foregone conclusion. That they were able to use the trial as a forum to put forth their ideas on democracy and a Taiwanese identity separate from China, was startling on an island ruled with an iron fist by Nationalists for more than three decades.

Lu was devastated by the 12-year sentence she received. She had been diagnosed with cancer several years earlier and felt she would die in prison. Released in 1985, after serving five and a half years, she went immediately to the United States to seek medical treatment, then continued her studies as a research fellow at Harvard's Human Rights Program.

At this point, she turned her attentions to winning international recognition for Taiwan, which had become increasingly isolated after the US severed diplomatic relations in 1979. She spent the next several years meeting influential political and social leaders and attending international conferences.

Lu took a seat in the national legislature in 1993, and played a key role on the Foreign Relations Committee. Then president Lee Teng-hui crossed party lines and appointed her a National Policy Adviser in 1996.

Indeed, the vice president-elect has more foreign policy experience than President-elect Chen, and hopes to serve as his adviser on foreign affairs.

But Chen may have to sideline Lu if he pursues his conciliatory tack toward Beijing, which still considers Taiwan part of China and warned Taiwanese voters not to vote for Chen's party, which has long sought formal independence from China.

Lu is viewed as representing the party's staunch pro-independence faction and some observers thing Chen will try to confine Lu to domestic affairs. Lu says she is not the ideologue some have made her out to be, and that she and Chen have distanced themselves from party factionalism.

Nevertheless, she insists that Taiwan is a de facto independent state, while adhering to Chen's campaign line that there is no need to declare formal independence -- unless China attacks.

"By electing our president, we have made it self-evident that we are an independent, sovereign state," she says. "With or without recognition, it does not matter. It's only sovereign states that have presidential elections."