Kim Dae Jung

Kim Dae-jung was the eighth President of South Korea, serving from 1998 to 2003, and the first South Korean recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Born on the island of Hauido off South Jeolla Province in 1924 during the Japanese colonial period, he survived imprisonment, kidnapping, exile, and a death sentence before reaching the presidency on his fourth attempt.

After working in shipping in Mokpo, he won a National Assembly seat in 1961 days before Park Chung-hee's military coup voided the result. Re-elected in 1963, he became the principal opposition challenger to Park, narrowly losing the 1971 presidential election. KCIA agents abducted him from a Tokyo hotel in 1973, and he was sentenced to death in 1980 under Chun Doo-hwan before international pressure commuted the sentence to exile.

Returning home in 1985, Kim ran unsuccessfully in 1987 and 1992 before winning the December 1997 election as the country plunged into the Asian financial crisis. His administration negotiated the IMF rescue package, restructured the chaebol conglomerates, and launched the National Basic Livelihood Security system.

His Sunshine Policy of engagement with North Korea produced the first inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize that October. He died in Seoul in August 2009 at eighty-five, mourned with a state funeral.

The name Kim is the most common Korean family name, written with the hanja meaning "gold," while the given name Dae-jung uses characters meaning "great" and "middle" or "centre." In Korean naming order the family name precedes the given name. He used the romanisation Kim Dae-jung, and the form is masculine in his case.