When he was a boy, few would have singled out Peng Ming-min as a future firebrand. Born in 1923 in Taiwan, then widely known as Formosa, he was bookish and other-worldly, with his main extra-curricular passion being baseball not politics. But by the time he had become a successful academic, four decades later, Taiwan’s peculiar and unhappy international position had virtually forced him into taking a political stand—one that was to lead him to jail, escape into exile and, eventually, a job as a presidential adviser, after a failed run at the top job himself.

In 1895 Taiwan had been ceded “in perpetuity” to Japan by decaying imperial China, in an effort to placate Japanese expansionism. Mr Peng’s father, the fourth generation of the family on the island, was a successful doctor and set great store by academic success. Ming-min did not disappoint. He was a school star, one of the few Formosans of his generation able to compete at the highest level with Japanese students, winning a place at university in Japan itself. To his father’s disappointment, he did not want to study medicine. To his relief, his son relented over his first love, French literature and philosophy, compromising on law and political science. He became a respected authority on international law, especially in the new fields of the law of the air and, later, space.