Kim Dae-jung
8th President of the Republic of Korea (1924–2009)
Kim Dae-jung (Korean: 김대중; pronounced [kim.dɛ.dʑuŋ]; 8 January 1924 – 18 August 2009) was a South Korean politician, activist, and statesman who served as the eighth president of South Korea from 1998 to 2003.
Originally an entrepreneur, Kim abandoned business and entered politics after the Korean War, becoming a member of the new wing of the Democratic Party. He was an opposition politician who carried out a democratization movement against the military dictatorship from the Third Republic in the 1960s to the Fifth Republic in the 1980s. He escaped death five times, spent six years in prison and ten years under house arrest and in exile. He was repeatedly imprisoned, exiled, almost killed by vehicular homicide, and sentenced to death by the military and political authorities. He ran unsuccessfully in presidential elections in 1971, 1987, and 1992. In the country's 15th presidential election in 1997, he defeated Grand National Party candidate Lee Hoi-chang through an alliance with Kim Jong-pil and the Democratic Liberal Party. Kim was the first opposition candidate to win the presidency. At the time of his inauguration in 1998, he was 74 years old, making him the oldest president in Korean history.
During his tenure, Kim Dae-jung worked to revive the South Korean economy, which had been hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and reformed the South Korean economic system, enabling South Korea to successfully complete the privatization of enterprises and the transformation of its industrial structure.
The public source identifies “Kim Dae-jung” as 8th President of the Republic of Korea (1924–2009). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dae-jung, President and Republic.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q45785. VIAF identifies the subject as 87633964. The Library of Congress control number is n81014483. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1924, 2009, 1998 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kim Dae-jung” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.