Chiang served as an associate professor in Soochow University before his political career. He was the penultimate Director-General of the Government Information Office from 2010 to 2011, a post he resigned to become a member of the Legislative Yuan in which he has served since 2012. In March 2020, he was elected the Chairman of the Kuomintang and assumed office on 9 March until he was succeeded by Eric Chu on 5 October 2021. Chiang took office as vice president of the Legislative Yuan on 1 February 2024.
Early education
Chiang was born on 2 March 1972. He attended elementary and junior high school in his hometown of Taichung before studying diplomacy at National Chengchi University.[2]
He earned a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh,[3] followed by a doctorate at the University of South Carolina, both in the United States of America. His doctoral dissertation was "Globalization and The Role of the State in Contemporary Political Economy: Taiwan and India in the 1980s and 1990s".[4]
He was named the head of the Government Information Office in 2010.[6] When Chiang was selected as a Kuomintang candidate for the legislature in April 2011,[8] he resigned the GIO position and was replaced by Philip Yang [zh].[9] Chiang was one of five former GIO officials to appear on the ballot.[10] He won election in 2012, and again in 2016. Chiang was chosen as one of five conveners of the Legislative Yuan's constitutional amendment committee in 2015.[11] He shared foreign and national defense committee convener duties with Liu Shih-fang in 2016.[12] Chiang announced his intention to contest the Taichung mayoralty in October 2017, becoming the second Kuomintang politician after Lu Shiow-yen to declare interest in the position.[13] It was reported in February 2018 that Chiang had narrowly finished second to Lu in three different public opinion polls that served as the Kuomintang's Taichung mayoral primary.[14] Chiang declared his candidacy for the 2020 Kuomintang chairmanship election on 25 January 2020, ten days after Wu Den-yih resigned the position.[15] Chiang defeated Hau Lung-pin in the leadership election, held on 7 March 2020.[16][17] Chiang took office as Kuomintang chairman on 9 March 2020.[18][19]
In March 2021, KMT chairman Johnny Chiang rejected the "one country, two systems" as a feasible model for Taiwan, citing Beijing's response to protests in Hong Kong as well as the value that Taiwanese place in political freedoms.[20] In September of that year, Chiang lost his bid to retain the chairmanship, finishing third behind Eric Chu and Chang Ya-chung.
