Song Chu-yu (Chinese: 宋楚瑜; Pinyin: Sòng Chǔyú; born 1942), also known as James Soong served as the first elected Governor of Taiwan from 1997 as a KMT politician. However, in protest of the KMT, under pressure from President Lee restricted the powers of the provincial administration and later refused to give him the presidential nomination for the 2000 presidential election, he ran for office as an independent, which led to the party expelling him and 21 of his supporters for breaching party discipline. He ended up splitting the pan-Blue coalition's vote share and losing to the DPP's Chen Shui-bian.
Following his defeat, he founded the People First Party, and ran on a shared ticket with the KMT in the 2004 presidential election, which he also lost.
