Thank you for joining us.

Sure.

Thank you very much for the interview. It’s the end of your day now, I think, or coming towards the end of your day. It’s kind of the start of our day here.

Good local time.

Anyway, I hope you are well today.

Pretty good.

Good. Let’s keep close. I’m interested just to begin with your role as a politician. As I said, are you an accidental politician?

You can say that certainly. I’m working with the government, not for the government. Even now, I refer to myself as a poetician.

You’re actually a minister, technically, without portfolio. You’re referred to, and I would refer to you in anything I write, as the digital minister. Technically, you don’t have the burdens of bureaucracy and the ministry. Do you?

There are nine ministers at large, or ministers without portfolio in the Taiwanese Cabinet. It’s part of the horizontal inter-agency coordination ministers. For example, we have the Minister Without Portfolio, Deng Chen-chung in charge of trade negotiations, which is, of course, a cross ministerial issue.

I am the minister without portfolio in charge of social innovation, open government, youth engagement, etc. These are my portfolio, I guess. This without portfolio means with no fixed portfolio.

Interesting. That’s a very interesting concept.

Going back to your own background as it were. Taiwan is traditional very ancient society. What was it like for you growing up in modern Taiwan?

When I was born, Taiwan was still under the martial law. Because my parents were both journalists, I still remember the struggles that they have to…there was still state censors at the time. They have to get their articles reviewed before it’s published, and there’s endless negotiations on the boundaries of free journalism, because at that time, there’s no freedom of the press.

When I was 15 years old – that was 1996 – that’s when Taiwan had our first presidential election, and began the modern democratization. Which coincides with the popularization of the world wide web technology.

So, in a sense, me growing up, when I was eight years old, that was the year when personal computers was popular, beginning to be popular. 1989, but it’s also the year of the Tiananmen incident, and it’s also the year of beginning of Taiwan’s lifting of the martial law, and the freedom of the press, and things like that.

I would say the democratization to me means not what…Democratization means this century, like, people say, “Oh, this product is democratizing video recording,” meaning that it’s accessible and inexpensive.

But back last century, when I was growing up, democratization means the real deal. People who were under very strict, even oppressive government, starting to figure out how to do decision-making together.

Interesting. In effect, what you’re saying, digitization coincide or assist the democratization process.

Yes, Internet and democracy, in many older republics and democracies, are two very different things, right? People working on the Internet wouldn’t call themselves public servants or work on democracy.

But in Taiwan, democracy began when Internet began. We saw democracy as something like semiconductor design, that everybody can participate to make better. I refer to this as democracy as a social technology.

My next question relates to formal education. Lots of societies, lots of governments saw increase, huge emphasis, on the formal structures of education. What’s your view on that? Is that overemphasized?

I don’t have a view because I’ve never attended senior high. I drop out on a second year of middle high. So, I’m not qualified to give an opinion about this, right?

But my personal experience being self-educated led eventually to the thriving, of what we call experimental education community in Taiwan. For the past more than one decade, up to 10% of Taiwanese students in the basic education, age range below 18, can be home-schooled or alternatively schooled or in groups, and so on.

That became the very thriving research community, that then inform our basic education curriculums. Which is like the development side of education policy. This idea, for example, competence instead of literacy only.

For example, working on autonomous furthering interaction to our common good instead of person-to-person, individual-to-individual competitions, working on the common good instead of competitions.

That all those came from the early practitioners of the experimental education community. I think Taiwan has much to thank for these people who enrolled in non-classical ways of curriculum.

Interesting. Switching to the pandemic, Taiwan’s had exceptional, if not unique, ability to control the pandemic.

Now, there are two phases…phase of the first year and then the last phase. Obviously, things went a bit a awry. Could you summarize for me what you think are the key aspects of Taiwan’s approach to the pandemic that made it so successful.

We’re now in the low single digits in local confirmed cases daily. Today was two, yesterday was one, the day before was two. I wouldn’t say we’re post-pandemic. I would say we postponed the pandemic rather successfully.

Starting last year, what we have seen certainly is that with a, what I call fast, fair, and fun social innovation community, what we have benefited is from this digital civic infrastructure such as the PTT public forum that alerted us to Dr. Li Wenliang’s message even before turning 2020, on the last day of 2019.

We acted before pretty much everyone else did, and we start health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. This is the rapid response enabled by true collective intelligence.

Now, this year, of course, having three-quarters of people wearing masks in spaces is obviously, not enough because the virus has also upgraded. SARS 2.0 became SARS 2.0 Alpha, and now we’re dealing with SARS 2.0 Delta and other Greek letters.

I think the main lesson we learned this time, this year, is that we need to massively shorten the time from someone who confirmed their infection to the full contact tracing history being certified by the professional contact tracers.

Last year we can do away with 24 hours or so of contact tracing on average to get a case history for the past 28 days, but this year because of the Alpha and then later Delta variants, 24 hours, which seemed fast is actually slow.

Nowadays, we wrote a lot of digital contact tracing technologies to ensure that within 24 minutes we can get the full contact tracing history from any one person, so that we can, for example, quarantine preventatively not just that person’s contacts but the contacts of those contacts.

Wow, and that’s all done electronically or digitally?

It’s still done by professional contact tracers, but they have the full view of what we call integrated contact tracing helping-platform, assistance-platform so that they can on a heat map look at a case histories as well as its contact.

Of course, that relies on people voluntarily checking in, scanning QR code, and making sure that the telecom that they trust store the 28-days history of their whereabouts when checking in all the venues and public transportation.

How did you know the tumult in the West? There’s a big issue of say privacy and people are afraid that you’ll get to a techno-surveillance state. This is a slippery slope. How does Taiwan deal with that?

By not inventing new data collection apparatus and touch points during the pandemic. We rely on existing trust relationships that already exists before the pandemic.

For example, when people scan the SMS-based QR code, they’re not downloading any app. It’s the camera that they already have on the phone. They don’t have to trust yet another app.

When they send SMS to 1922, it’s not sent to the government. It’s sent to their telecommunications carrier. One of any five telecommunication carriers in Taiwan, whomever you trust most, you can put your check-in history there.

If contact tracers look at that record, you get a, I think the French call it sousveillance, a reverse audit so that you can go online and see the past 28 days who exactly accessed your records. They must be, of course, a certified contact tracer.

There’s public access for the individuals as to who’s looking and that’s the key in trust.

That’s exactly right, and you don’t have to have a smartphone, even with a flip phone, you can manually key in the 15-digit to 1922, so it’s very transparent.

Even for people who have no phones, they can still have what we call a seal here, like a stamp. Their family name or how they would like to be called when contact tracer calls them. A phone, maybe landline, that can reach them and stamp it like a name card to the venue.

We’re not outlawing. We’re not doing a top-down dictate that says everybody has to use a smartphone. We’re saying people who prefer to store the data in their telecoms do so, but the other people who trust the venues more will still do so with slips of paper.

OK, great. Moving on to the issue of vaccines, to understand the difficulties, now, on acquiring them, etc. Why do you think this is?

One reason is that we simply do not have that much emergency in locally confirmed cases. Even at a height of May, first wave, the real first wave, we still pale in comparison to the jurisdictions around the world that are truly dire, where the health care system was at a verge or already beyond the verge of breakdown, and Taiwan never got to that place.

Whether it’s in COVAX or whether it’s in other international polylateral communities, we did not have a very strong case that says we need the vaccines, like, right now…

OK, so you didn’t need them, up to now. You had solved the…

..when I got my first jab of AstraZeneca, April 21st, I had to convince, and not successfully, my friends and families to get vaccinated. My executive secretary, my families, none of them want to get vaccinated.

They’re like, “Yeah, of course, we can wait.” You can imagine, in April, if I’m seen as weird in trying the vaccination myself. By May, we wouldn’t be able to schedule that much vaccine delivery.

You offer yourself as the guinea pig.

That’s right.

The thing that I think most impressed people in the West has been Taiwan’s unique success in looking after the residence of elderly care homes.

Yeah, definitely. My maternal grandma is in one of those care places.

What can you put that down to?

First of all, simply because we have a low prevalence of the COVID in the first place, but also, I believe because we have universal health care. In those care places, when people, for example, want to limit the influx of visitors, it can be done very successfully.

That is to say, it boils down to enabling the contact tracing to work, not just swiftly, but also in a very reliable fashion so that we can make sure that if there’s one or two isolated workers in those places that may have the risk of spreading the disease, they can be, as I mentioned, the case history can be detected in 24 minutes now.

Then, the contacts quarantine, and so the elderly, the more senior people that are less likely to move, would not get impacted by this spreading vector.

Also, when we finally got enough willingness to get vaccinated by May because of our real first wave, we made sure that the seniors in elderly care homes are the first batch to be vaccinated. My grandma, as I mentioned, is among the first. I think a couple of weeks after I did.

I’m not familiar with the structure of the care homes is doing. In Ireland, for instance, it’s both state and private. I believe you said it’s a universal health system, but is it state-owned or privately run or both?

It’s a state, single-payer; there’s no opting out. Meaning that even for people who are not citizens, even if you’re a resident, someone who work here, you still enjoy the universal health care.

That is why people are so willing to report to their local clinics and to contact tracers because they know they will carry zero financial or social burden by saying, “Oh, I may be diagnosed with COVID, but that’s fine.”

Even for people who are having COVID-like symptoms, but are not COVID, they’re very much willing to get screened because they know there’s no burden under universal health care.

Looking a little bit forward now on the pandemic, it almost looks like we’re going to have to live with versions of this virus for quite a while. Do you think there’s a role for therapeutics rather than vaccines impacting future outbreaks?

Yeah, of course, and therapeutics are being worked on. We have procured monoclonal antibodies to treat the people in need of the emergency treatment.

I also believe that as the virus mutates, the mutation strains that get far more lethal than COVID-19 already is going back to original SARS-like lethality. That’s not going to sustain well if they’re compared vis-a-vis the more viral, but less lethal versions of the variance. The natural progression is for the virus to be even more easy to spread but even less lethal.

Yes. Moving on to the economy again a little historical review. Taiwan has changed dramatically in the last few decades. It’s now leading to claim the house in microchip area. How was that transformation executed?

It boils down to two things. One is that we’re very much willing to help. We’re not here to dominate. To say, “We may help on something, but it’s with strings attached. You have to give us support of yours,” or something like that. We’re not that kind of ally.

We enjoy the broad goodwill of the international community when it comes to, for example, the configuration of the supply chain. You mentioned chips. Well, the Taiwan Semiconductor Company is not rolling out its own portable smartphone. That is the helpful alliance that I was mentioning in the global configuration of the supply chain. That’s one.

Second, we’ve proved to be very stable politic-wise. Even when we have several changes of parties on the presidency and several changes in Parliament. Universally, I think, the international trade partners and international partners in human rights and civil society and so on, find Taiwan a very stable place to voice their concerns.

We have, for example, people from Hong Kong voicing their experiences. Sometimes, as expats or exchange students to the international community. They don’t have to worry that if some party rules Taiwan’s next presidency, they will be expatriated.

It’s relatively stable in the world and very stable compared to other jurisdictions in Indo-Pacific.

Staying with the chip production for the moment, it’s mainly or has been up to recently foundry production. TSMC is a leader obviously, is there an attempt to as we move up the value chain to get chip design and the more higher value add?

Of course, the semiconductor ecosystem is not just TSMC. It’s also MediaTek, there’s many designs and foundries and so on. What we’re looking at, is active partnerships with like, like-minded ecosystem partners around the world.

We’re not saying that you have to concentrate all the energy, or the design, and so on in Taiwan. in fact, I believe TSMC is working actively with the US, with Japan, and with many jurisdictions to make sure that it’s reciprocal our relationship to make sure that whatever we learned here, can be applied there.

Whatever they have, they can also be learned here. I think it’s a win-win relationship. I don’t think the future canvas is a single design of the chips to be monopolized by a zero-sum market force.

I believe, with the future of machine learning, of beyond 5G, and so on, we’re going to have a lot of very varied demand of chips and this quick iteration with the local teams. That’s where the real value is, not just the bulk of the production.

Taiwan is still currently very dependent on China trade economically, like, how vulnerable is it on that scope?

I don’t think “Taiwan depends on the PRC economically” is quite a right description, though.

It is true that there are several areas of trade that it’s been quite active, but total percentage wise we’re seeing a rather stable percentage of the Taiwan/PRC trade relationships. Our exports and imports to other jurisdictions are also growing proportionally, so we’re pretty… what was the English word, diversed?

Diversified.

Diversified, right. We’re pretty diversified in terms of our trade partnerships. I’m not saying that trade agreements or trade negotiations are not going on with our trade partners, but even without bilateral trade agreements, it doesn’t seem likely to hurt the trade aspects in Taiwan in the near term so much.

It’s still about 25, 30 percent, though. It’s still significant.

It’s significant. What I’m trying to say is that it’s stable.

Yes. The …famous instance in itself is not really significant, although for the farmers involved in the famous pineapple issue that brought a lot of attention, it just shows us the vulnerability in a situation, which is, obviously, potentially very tense.

The pineapple issue, some supermarkets in Japan discovered ways to process the pineapples from Taiwan into very delicious, easy to cut small boxes. I’m pretty sure that life finds its way ahead. It leads to service sector innovations, it seems.

Finding the origins of the virus is a critical one for the global community, for everybody. It’s, obviously, a very tense situation now between every country and China in effect as to where exactly it came from. How does Taiwan view this issue, which is obviously a major one geopolitically?

In the very beginning of the pandemic, we did send two experts to Wuhan, to try to learn of the origin and the human to human transmission, but they didn’t learn much detail. It seems that freedom of the press is really the distinguishing factor here.

When Dr. Li Wenliang whistle blowing of the, and I quote, “Seven new cases in Huanan seafood market,” end of quote, spread to Taiwan, the PTT that’s the social sector Reddit-like but open-source, no advertiser or shareholder’s platform is all over it.

Within 24 hours we’ve triaged that message and then informed our decisive action to have the health inspection for incoming flights. The same message from Dr. Li Wenliang didn’t reach the average person in Wuhan.

Even if people in Wuhan have things to say to contribute to finding out the impact and origin and related issues, they wouldn’t know about it because there is no free press, and I think it made a world of difference in the beginning of the pandemic.

Yes, we should. In fact, in the first, I may send you after this interview, send you a copy of the introductory first chapter of a new book which I mentioned them go through the Taiwan experience like what happened.

Going back to the issue of, do you know any review, given that it’s a central issue now and has changed somewhat from being overwhelmingly seen as a natural spillover event to now at least equal parts, so to speak, the virus could’ve come from the lab? Do you have a view on either of those?

As I mentioned because of the lack of journalistic freedom, what reports that were in the beginning of the pandemic is not conclusive. Indeed that’s what the two experts from Taiwan eventually learned that they just couldn’t learn that much from that point on.

I don’t currently have a firm view one way or another, but my view is firmly that more journalistic freedom would be better in this regard.

Given that’s not likely to happen in China at the moment.

It’s still very important.

They’re very obstinate in not allowing, the WHO, a second new inquiry not one effectively or to cooperate.

Yeah, but a free journalistic sector, I think maybe I’m passionate about it because my parents were journalists under a martial law era regime.

My parents always said that even during the martial law era, a free and thriving journalistic sector also informs the decision-makers without which the decision-maker doesn’t even have reliable knowledge of what’s going on, on the ground.

Let alone, what investigative capacity that they may have, they cannot invest that to the actual emerging thing. Even in authoritarian regimes, journalism is important.

Moving on to the political issues that Taiwan is facing currently. Taiwan is actively on the frontline of the current tensions. We see now where “Global Times,” yesterday or the day before an editorial said, “We’re going to start flying fighter jets,” a new threat as it were…

That’s not exactly news. It’s been saying that for a while.

They’ve been saying it but they haven’t actually done it.

I know.

You realize of saying the Afghanistan withdrawal where this question of people, allies of the US are saying, “Well, maybe we can’t trust them as much.” Does Taiwan feel a little bit more vulnerable, so to speak, in the light of last month’s catastrophe in Kabul?

There’s been some discussions and debates on that matter between those parliamentarians and journalists on this regard, but the rough consensus seems to be that Taiwan is no Afghanistan and it’s not a comparable situation.

OK. Looking at the geopolitical situation of the sanctions in China, there has been a big, big change, in my view, my experience, and West in terms of China, since the pandemic began.

Xi Jingping now comes across to many, in a way opinion polls show, as being effectively a new mode. Does Taiwan see him in that light?

Even before the pandemic, I think there are already discussions around, for example, that the indefinite extension of Xi Jingping’s terms.

The commentators in Taiwan’s political journalism and commentators, they didn’t miss that. We’ve been having that conversation and those commentaries in Taiwanese media for quite a while. It’s not exclusive to the pandemic times.

I, of course, understand that the international community, I wouldn’t say wake up to, but is becoming gradually more aware of it. Taiwan has been aware of that since many years ago.

What of his…he keeps beating the drum of, “We got to reunify the country,” and Taiwan is obviously put in light here…

It wasn’t unified to begin with, so it’s not a fact… That “re-“ was not true.

No, I understand that, but from his point of view, Xi seems to have from his point, he sees it as a big issue of it, the reunification drive for him personally. Well, he’s probably the major objective…

Aspirations?

Yeah, for sure in the next five or ten years on all of that. It obviously is a bit of a conflict, to put it mildly, for Taiwan.

Well again, it’s not news. We’ve been hearing that for many decades now, right? I think what’s important is that we see ourselves, as you mentioned, on the frontline, but not just on the frontline of tension, but also on the frontline of advancing democracy.

You see, when we work on our social issues like countering pandemic, countering disinformation, and things like that, there’s this counterfactual neighbor that solves the same problems, but with a way that takes power away from journalists, from small and medium businesses and into the center, right, into the central government.

No matter which political party you are in, in Taiwan, people broadly agree that that’s not where we’re going. That we need to counter the pandemic, but we don’t want lockdown.

We need to counter the infodemic, but we don’t want a takedown. We don’t want top-down shutdowns.

What I’m trying to say is that the existence of the PRC and the PRC’s philosophy on tackling these social issues serves, I think, as a motivator for Taiwan to innovate and also for us to unify.

If there’s one thing that all those different four parties in the Parliament can agree is deepening our democracy and connecting with the world, and PRC served as an example of not going there, as us not wanting to go there.

In fact, Minister, that’s precisely probably back the reason why they want to try and shut down Taiwan for showing their lack of democracy on the one hand and their lack of progress in many respects.

Their policy of excluding Taiwan from international organizations, which they’ve been allowed into, the so-called international rules-based system. Is there anything Taiwan can do to change that to get access to the WHO, get access to… ?

The pandemic changed that quite a lot. Previously, when the meetings were held in physical places, I had to, for example in 2017, send a double robot of myself into the Internet Governance Forum of the UN Geneva building because while I’m free to speak, I was not physically free to enter, but a robot needs no passport.

I had this conversation in UN Geneva building with the IGF folks. Nowadays, that was seen as avant garde and even a little bit strange in 2017, but now even the UN General Assembly is video-conferenced.

In effect, when all of us are essentially 16 by 9 boxes, it doesn’t create a situation where it’s easy to exclude Taiwan. Taiwan now is as easy to reach as any other top-level domains.

If you type digitalminister.tw, even if you are in the PRC jurisdiction, you still go to my website and not theirs. This .tw, this idea of Taiwan connecting to the world through the digital means is, by itself, a configuration beyond original Westphalian order.

Nowadays, when we’re talking about global issues of common urgency like climate change and fighting the pandemic, naturally, we include the stakeholders, the major groups, and civil society.

Taiwan’s seat at these tables are much more guaranteed than previously when people had to convene in a single UN building.

If we could summarize for me on this point, the point you made, it’s a very interesting one. In effect, you’re saying that the combination of the pandemic, which has forced people to communicate digitally is, in a sense, undermining the Westphalian system of hundreds of years.

Or it’s augmenting it, right? Some people already are calling it a polylateral system where the lines, the laterals, are not just Westphalian delegates and ambassadors, but rather anyone having a broadband connection.

At the moment, you’re obviously enjoying your sojourn in politics. Will you continue?

Sure. It’s fun, and I still see myself not working for the government. I’m between the government on one side and the social movements on the other. I’m at a Lagrange point between the two gravity centers.

OK. Looking forward, in the medium term, if you like, where do you see Taiwan going in the next five to ten years?

Well, in the next 10 years, Taiwan is going to raise by 25 centimeters, that’s for sure because we’re caught between the Eurasian Plate and Philippine Sea Plate, it’s not metaphoric, it’s geological.

You’re growing taller in the world.

That’s right. We’re growing taller, skyward. All those earthquakes are making Taiwan rise quite physically. I often talk about this point in terms of resilience.

What we are doing now is building, all the buildings that can withstand the earthquakes, the likes of which have never happened before, so we’re anticipating future earthquakes.

The same goes for our political system. Our society who are bracing, of course, to even more tensions between the Eurasian Plate and the sea plate in the medium term, but all those preparations or those social innovations towards making sure that the society is ready for this conflict turned into innovation makes Taiwan rise.

Without this tension of having to counter the pandemic with no lockdown, we wouldn’t invent the kind of contact tracing, mask rationing, and things like that. That is widely applicable and helpful to, not just Indo-Pacific, but the global community.

What would you like your legacy to be, Minister?

People have asked, previously, a different version of this question, what would I like to write on my tombstone? Your version is a more civil one.

My answer to that question was, “Fullwidth Space.” I will like to be remembered as a good enough ancestor, who have prepared for the next generation to shine and thrive even more, and give them even more opportunities and chances, rather than being perfect.

A top-down design of everything that, essentially, takes away, decimates the opportunity to innovate to the future generation. “Good enough ancestor,” I guess, is a pretty good term.

Minister, listen, thank you very much for your time. As I say, in the short term, like today, I’ll send Frances a copy of the first chapter.

Sure. OK.

When I get to Taiwan, hopefully, when the flights resume next year or whenever, I’ll look you up.

Definitely. Until then, live long and prosper. Bye.

Thank you very much. Bye, for now.