So the first question is a very broad one: What does it mean to be Taiwanese today?

Taiwan has been around for quite a while, right? For millions of years, the collision between the Eurasian plate on one side and the Philippine Sea plate on the other side, the tectonic collisions, has caused Taiwan to continuously rise toward the stars.

And so, to me, the people of Taiwan, through a plurality of internal and external interactions, have persistently evolved into a “co-creation from conflict” community.

Each earthquake — tectonic plates bumping into one another — raises the tip of Taiwan, the Jade Mountain, every year by half a centimeter. It provides an opportunity for Taiwan to grow taller, so every challenge reaffirms our collective direction, upward and onward.

To me, the spirit of Taiwan is co-creation from conflicts.

Do you think that today that sense is intensifying amongst Taiwanese people? Do you think that that’s kind of got more kind of intense in view of the current situation?

I think there’s a lot more diversity now in Taiwan compared to when I was a young person. We were just lifting the martial law when I was a kid, and the diversity of Taiwan has increased tremendously, but so has our capability for turning conflicts into co-creation.

So to your question, I think it’s both that there’s more conflicts — because we’re more diverse — but also we’re much more transcultural and co-creative.

Great, thank you. When you look at, for instance, the online usage and social media in Taiwan today, this is obviously an area that you cover very intensively. What are the particular characteristics of online usage and social media in Taiwan today, and are there differences between age groups in terms of their use of social media and how they engage and learn from it?

I mean, I get the sense from outside of Taiwan that Taiwanese are extremely socially, kind of internet savvy, very digitally connected. How does that characterize Taiwanese today?

How does it shape their behavior, and what does it do to their social and political lives?

Yeah, as you mentioned, Taiwan places consistently on the top, especially among jurisdictions of over 20 million people, internet usage, 5G speed, universal access, and so on.

So I think it’s not about specific age groups. It’s about everyone, all of Taiwan, having access to the information and, as you mentioned, social interactions online. And so in our ministry, the moda, Ministry of Digital Affairs, we’re all about building digital resilience and trust for all.

As for information integrity, I would highlight as the most challenging issue, but it’s not just in Taiwan, it’s in any liberal democracies. We’re all facing challenges to information integrity with the emerging challenges such as deep fakes and so on. But Taiwan, I think, brings a very unique, especially among Asian jurisdictions, solution on the table to information integrity problem.

Indeed, according to Freedom House in the Freedom on the Net 2023 report, were the highest in the Asia Pacific region in terms of internet freedom, which means that the government will not and indeed cannot take away online liberties as a response to information integrity challenges.

We essentially work with the people, not for the people, which is quite unique among East Asian jurisdictions.

And so, for example, we work through the AI Evaluation Center, the AIEC, to work on language models that are more attuned to our local culture and so on. So we don’t ban the language models that are not part of our culture, but we promote ones that are. Or, for example, starting January, all agencies can send SMS using one share number, 111, or similar short codes.

Again, not banning the use of SMS or other communication services for information exchange, but ensuring that the authenticity of the governmental officials are very easily identified. So it becomes very hard to impersonate a governmental agency and so on. So in short, we focus on making sure the provenance, the trustworthiness of the actor and the behavior layer, instead of clamping down on the content layer to protect the integrity of information.

When you use the term the information resilience, I think you said information resilience. What do you mean by that, information resilience?

Sure. When we say information resilience or digital resilience, we mean that whenever we face adversity ranging from, for example, earlier this year, the two subsea cables connecting Matsu Island and Taiwan proper have been cut by two ships flying the PRC flag, “accidentally” destroying the ability for Matsu to enjoy high bandwidth internet access.

Facing such gray zone operations, we immediately responded along with the NCC, the National Communication Commission, with microwave, with satellite connectivity, so on and so forth. So as to render such disruptions ineffective when it comes to threatening the access to broadband internet.

It also pertains to, for example, cyber attacks when our websites were DDoS’ed last August, by adversary forces around the time of Pelosi’s visit. We switched immediately to distributed layers of content, so that instead of hosting the website content on one cluster of computers, we spread it out so that anyone with some spare bandwidth and hard disk can help to keep us afloat by joining the interplanetary file system, the IPFS.

And again, this is resilience, that is to say overcoming adversity and upgrading our infrastructure so that next time the same adversity cannot harm us anymore. And just finally on this issue, you mentioned the threats to other democracies.

Do you feel sometimes that the internet, it’s bought great benefits, obviously, the World Wide Web, but it’s also bought massive problems, obviously, that had a bidding impact, a huge impact in American and European politics and your politics too.

I mean, do you sometimes think that the advantages and the disadvantages are almost the same now, or do you feel that still it’s overwhelmingly better that we have such a free-flowing internet and that it embodies freedom of speech and these things?

Yeah. I mean, in Taiwan, during the three years of pandemic, we’ve never had a day where you cannot travel from a city to another. We’ve never had domestic lockdowns. We had very strict border quarantine rules. We had privacy preserving contact tracing. We had pretty good mask use and hand washing and so on. And so we don’t generally see the personal liberties of moving from a city to another as at odds with public health concerns.

But in other jurisdictions, like everybody that’s not New Zealand, there are some trade-offs to be made. So people had to give up some personal liberties in order to keep the virus at bay. So I think it depends on how resilient your infrastructure was. Taiwan fared pretty badly during SARS, actually the worst during SARS outbreak. Because of that, and thanks to the investment in resilience infrastructure, we have the kind of infrastructure for COVID because it’s like SARS coming again. And so we don’t have to make that trade-off anymore.

So, to extend the analogy back to information integrity, we’ve had a pretty good resilience infrastructure in 2014, around the time where the retweet and share buttons were causing problems over the world. And because of our investment into, for example, changing the literacy in curriculum into competence.

Instead of media literacy, which is about critically receiving information, we changed our entire basic education curriculum to be about competence, which is about practicing journalism from a very young student level and so on. So nowadays, I think we have a higher antibody to the information integrity threats, as well as a more capable civil society, social sector, when it comes to countering this kind of emerging threats, without which we will be pressured as other Asian jurisdictions and indeed around the world are, to impose some top-down, lockdown, take down measures.

Because of our high resilience, we don’t have to make that trade-off, at least not to the degree as our nearby jurisdictions. So to your question, I think the benefits only outweigh the drawbacks if one invests in resilience infrastructure, if one does not, and indeed just rely on the goodwill of the leading multinational platforms to serve as town halls, as public squares, then you are indeed at mercy of a, I want to call it also a jurisdiction, another jurisdiction that have overlapping concerns, but it’s not their primary concern to support liberal democracy worldwide.

Great, thank you very much. And then just on the issue of threats, most people see the Chinese threat on Taiwan as a military one, but clearly cyberspace has become a source of concern, as you just referred to a couple of times with cyber attacks and other disruptive actions.

One of the surprises of Russia’s attack on Ukraine is how little role cyber has so far played. How do you assess the threat from China in this regard? And what do you feel is the best way of countering it?

Well, I want to push back a little bit about how little role cyber has played because Ukraine did invest in resilience infrastructure right after Crimea, which is why they rendered most of the Russian cyber attacks not very effective.

They’ve also invested in non-geosynchronous satellite connectivity, which is why even when the fiber optic lines are bombarded, they can still keep the daily broadcasts from Kiev and so on. So I would say that it’s not surprising to me that the Russian cyber attacks have not had the strategic goals that they initially wanted to achieve. That is exactly because Ukraine took years to invest in resilience as we are doing for the past couple of years.

And I would also say that we’ve had a lot of coordinated defense, not just from Taiwan, but also jointly from the largest public cloud companies, from our liberal democratic allies and so on. Because unlike in the traditional kinetic field, when a new virus or a new cyber attack hits Taiwan, it can hit the nearby allies even if they’re not nearby in a geographical sense. If they use the same operating system, the same configuration, the next minute they will face the same attack.

So the adjacency is not by geographics, but rather by shared values and systems. And so the joint defense is very important. And so we’ve been adopting, as the US and other liberal democracies are adopting, the so-called zero trust architecture, meaning that instead of relying just on the firewall or just on passwords and so on, for each access, one needs to pass at least three different checks.

So for example, when I sign an official document, my biometric, my fingerprint is checked by my phone. The integrity of my phone is checked by crowd strike. The integrity of crowd strike is checked by cloudflare and so on. So that even when one of them is breached, we assume one of them is probably already breached at any given time, it will be stopped in their tracks by the other two defenses. And so by adopting the same zero trust architecture, we can then contribute back from our cybersecurity industry to help safeguard other liberal democracies as well.

Okay, thank you. So what is the, in view of the sort of pressures put on Taiwan, and I mean a lot of people now are very interested in the situation of Taiwan and they have lots of different reasons for being so, people in America obviously and elsewhere. What is the one thing that you would like the outside world to better understand about the situation in Taiwan and the issue that Taiwan faces today?

Do you think that there are misconceptions about what Taiwan’s chief threat is? Or is there something that you would like the world to know better in order to help with the resilience and the issues you’ve just been talking about?

Yeah, so when I was a child, there’s this branding called MIT, Made in Taiwan. And we are now spreading the message of when you think about T is not just for Taiwan, it’s also trustworthiness. So “Taiwan is Trustworthy.”

I think that is the main idea we want to spread. We’re the home of trusted technologies.

This applies, of course, to semiconductors. If you’re doing any advanced AI or indeed any advanced computation, you probably already trust TSMC and its supply chain. Its cybersecurity is safeguarded by the SEMI E187 standard that we worked with the semiconductor supply chain people to introduce zero trust architecture to their supply chain so that the entire supply chain is more trustworthy.

And so I signed last year with 60 other partner countries, the declaration for the future of the internet or DFI. And we want to extend this trustworthiness that Taiwan enjoys in hardware, also to internet and also to software. Our cybersecurity system, as I mentioned, are literally battle tested.

And our AI evaluation center is also now looking to evaluate with the whole society what kind of advanced AI models fits the societal norm instead of government dictating what is acceptable or not. We want to involve everyone in a multi-stakeholder fashion so that everybody can tune their models to fit their own cultures. Taiwan has more than 20 national languages and 42 different variation of 16 indigenous nations.

So each and every one of them need to build their own trust through this multi-stakeholder model on the best use of AI and so on. So whether it is chips, whether it’s internet, whether it’s AI and so on, we want to share this idea that Taiwan is trustworthy. We’re the home of trusted tech.

You usually use this sort of phrase about this sort of need to involve society. I mean, so social consent is important for what you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to achieve. I mean, obviously, you’re very advanced and can offer some kind of ideas and model for doing this.

I mean, when you look at other places, do you feel that that issue is forgotten sometimes, that social consent and the information technology, I mean, it’s extremely difficult to carry some communities along with that.

I mean, when you look at where you are, do you feel that there are many other countries that are in the same place or do you feel that you’re really kind of an out leader here?

Well, we learn from like-minded countries. For example, our e-petition system is largely grown from the Icelandic Better Reykjavik system. Our participatory budget learns from Barcelona and Madrid. Our systems of T-Road is an homage to X-road from Estonia. I’m also a Lithuanian e-resident, so on and so forth.

So there are many liberal democracies that are facing very similar challenges and they decide again to adapt what we call Plurality, which is collaborative diversity, turning conflict into co-creation. So I don’t think we’re alone in this.

And I would also say that we are seeing increasingly that the largest multinational Silicon Valley companies work quite closely with the top AI labs, the open AI democratic inputs, and what they call collective alignment, the anthropic team of collective constitutional AI, so on and so forth. I think, which is why I call them jurisdictions. They’re also involving the stakeholders and increasingly citizens in co-creating the norms to work with each other in additional space, especially around generative AI.

So I think this idea of Plurality is gaining ground. I’m cautiously optimistic that this can be applied to even larger jurisdictions. When we talk about public code and co-creation and so on, it’s quite often that many jurisdictions are doing that, but Taiwan is the most populous one. But we’re increasingly seeing, for example, with the advent of digital agency in Japan and so on, there are larger countries that are also trying this method.

Thank you. And I mean, in terms of some of the interest in Taiwan in the outside world, obviously at the moment it’s extremely high profile issue and people are drawing parallels with Russia, Ukraine.

Do you, I mean, as you’re sitting in Taiwan and you work in the Taiwanese government and obviously some of that must be welcomed, do you sometimes sort of wish that the outside world had a different kind of care for Taiwan?

I mean, I guess what I mean is that, from my observation, many people are very interested and engaged with the externals of Taiwan. I mean, the external issues, and they look at it as part of a big geopolitical issue because of China. And they probably don’t really attend much to what’s happening in Taiwan and the complex society there and the politics and what we’re seeing in the presidential election now. And do you wish sometimes that Taiwan was seen less from the external and more from the internal?

I mean, that people were clear about what they’re protecting, because it seems that people are, they’re interested in protecting a geopolitical idea and Taiwan is part of that. But are they interested in protecting Taiwan as Taiwan?

Well, maybe because I meet people who are here for extended amount of time, because we work on this Gold Card program where it became very easy for anyone who contributes to open source, to even blogging or YouTube communicators to get three years renewable residency, including health benefits, healthcare, and so on for their family in Taiwan.

Indeed, during the pandemic, many of my Silicon Valley friends are in Taiwan, thanks to the Gold Card program. So I think, although many of them joined from zero times, let’s call it that, as soon as they land in Taiwan, they feel that this transcultural friendliness, I think it’s very hard to miss as long as you start spending even a week in Taiwan. And I think Taiwan really is home to many, many traditions and including new traditions.

For example, the bubble tea is a tradition that started from Taiwan. We’ve got many people who are in Taiwan for the pride parade for marriage equality, LGBTIQA+ cultures. We’ve got people, Maori people and other Australian people who consider Taiwan their primeval home of the Australian Indigenous nations and so on.

So I think maybe it’s because of the kind of people I meet, but many people cherish the cultural traditions either started from Taiwan or significantly blended in Taiwan, like Boba — bubble tea. And then they want to also spread that idea of collaborative diversity in their original ethnicities or their original countries.

Great, thank you very much. So this is really about the issue of culture. China is often talked to the power of common cultural links between China and Taiwan and given the impression that these override all political and economic differences, when cultures, as we’ve been saying, is clearly an important issue.

How would you characterize Taiwanese culture and in what way is it linked to Taiwanese identity? And in what ways is it distinctive?

Yeah, as I was just mentioning, Taiwan is the cradle of numerous lineages and cultures since ancient times. Austronesian nations and new inhabitants are after a few hundred years of pursuing democracy. So I would say that our identity is transcultural.

Indeed, I translated the name of our country, 中華民國, as a transcultural republic of citizens. So this transcultural identity with the civil society in strong, it’s the main body, like the social sector being the main sector, not the public or private sectors.

I think this is very new, very unique to Taiwan. It is a blending of participatory democracy on one side and internet universal broadband access on the other, which is why we’re often referred to as a digital democracy.

And I think all of this is part of Taiwanese identity. And because it’s transcultural, it incorporates many parts of many other cultures, including, of course, the Mandarin-speaking, Taiki-speaking, and Hakka-speaking cultures.

Great. And I think in terms of the Chinese government’s appeal all the time to this idea of a common Chinese culture, obviously as part of a transcultural kind of context, there would be recognition of some Chinese elements, I suppose. Like as a person living in Britain, I recognize some European elements to culture in my situation.

Because of the way in which China uses this idea of Chinese culture and it’s meant to be so strong. What does that mean for Taiwanese today? I mean, it must mean something, but what does it mean for them?

Yeah, the term for the culture, for example, Mandarin as spoken is sometimes called the Hua Yu, the Hua language. And Hua means literally flower. It also means culture. But I think it’s situated differently.

When I translated 中華 (lit. “inbetween cultures”) to “transcultural”, I mean something like it’s in between many different cultures. It’s a culture that is a meta-culture that is formed by co-creation across many diverse cultures.

But 华 is also situated in some Mandarin combinations to say 华 / 夷, 华 being “civilized” in a civilized/barbaric spectrum. So the central civilized culture, seeing every other culture as barbaric, which is a very different view. Because according to that view, only one culture, the 华 culture has the mandate of heaven — everything else is barbaric.

From my point of view, 華 being transcultural, every new culture that a transcultural encounter brings to Taiwan, we can fuse it into a transcultural co-creation without erasing the diversity, indeed encouraging that diversity.

So I think it is precisely this different outlook on incoming diversity that is currently distinguishing the PRC regime’s treatment of the so-called 华 culture, and our treatment of the transcultural, the 華 transculture.

Great, thank you very much. Then the final question is a very simple one, but probably not an easy one. Do you believe in the concept of internet sovereignty?

Well it is a fact that our domain name, .tw, is quite independent from .uk and .us and obviously .cn, right?

So, when I signed as a partner to the declaration for the future of the internet, I signed as a partner to the democratic community more than anything else. This is a different way of thinking about sovereignty as opposed to the Westphalian, the traditional way of thinking about sovereignty.

The DFI is more about shared resilience, is admitting overlapping jurisdiction from the outset, which is why the adoption of open multi-stakeholderism. And so, we refer to each other as partners, as democracies. And again, this is an emphasis on the governance system, not the Westphalian status of the polity.

So I think our ministry, the moda, is consciously doing a different way of interpreting diplomacy or sovereignty. Instead of a department for international cooperation, we don’t have that, we have a department of democracy network. So we work with any democratic governed polities that may or may not be part of a UN recognized nation or state.

Case in point, the people who want to form democratic communities, even within autocracies, we still work with them and work on tamper-proof, coercion-proof information systems that enables this kind of internet sovereignty, among internet-enabled sovereignty, self-sovereignty among those traditionally called Web3 cultures and Web3 communities.

So long story short, I think the point we’re making is that this collaborative diversity is not limited to Westphalian ideas of sovereignty. This digital, internet-first kind of self-determination or sovereignty admits overlapping jurisdictions from day one, and I think paves the way for more people-to-people ties — instead of just Westphalian country-to-country, state-to-state ties — on the internet.

Great, thank you. Just a couple of final things. One is, you’ve used the word resilience a lot, you’ve used the term zero trust. That seems to indicate a very defensive mindset.

Obviously I’m not saying offensive, you know, how does Taiwan operate? So I can understand how Taiwan operates defensively. What is the alternative to that, where Taiwan is more, not offensive, but more promoting of a sort of positive, outward-looking vision?

I see what you mean. Yeah, the corresponding hashtag is #TaiwanCanHelp, which is the official hashtag of our foreign service. And our ministry’s hashtag is #FreeTheFuture. So #TaiwanCanHelp #FreeTheFuture is the more outreach-y public diplomacy way that says, because of our defensive, resilient investments, we happen to have a lot of ready-made, battle-tested components.

Just as Taiwan gave freely the medical-grade masks to people around the world during the pandemic, we’re happy to share those public codes. If you’re also interested in not just defending against biological coronavirus, but computer virus, right? Computer kind of attacks, right? So the PPEs in the digital realm, we’re happy to share with liberal democracies.

And indeed, we get a lot of support from people around the world, not because they love Taiwan as a political entity, but because they enjoy this kind of open source procreation. We’ve successfully given gold cards to science communicators like AsapSCIENCE, web3 creators like Vitalik Buterin, and so on, not because they are loyal in the traditional sense, but because they feel like neighbors, feel like we’re very like even in when it comes to this common commitment on Plurality — collaborative diversity.

So I would say that on the internet, there’s no geographic distance. There’s only proximity of values. And when the values are close, it’s very easy to help one another. And this “Taiwan can help free the future” is the outreaching part of the diplomatic posture that complements well with the more defensive, as you said, the resilient part of it.

Great. Thank you. Just very finally, obviously, this book, I hope, will have a decent audience.

I mean, is there something you, if you were asked to write a book about Taiwan for the outside world to give some sense of where it is today and what it means, what do you think that this key message of this book should be?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it depends on your audience’s preferences, whether it is more political or cultural or economic. But I think definitely I would highlight this idea of “Taiwan can help.”

That is to say, instead of like when I was young, that the overarching message sometimes we see is “Taiwan needs international help.” But after we successfully countered the pandemic and also the infodemic and so on, I think we’re now at a place where we can help on many of those things.

I would also emphasize the idea of Plurality. Instead of forcing the society to make trade-offs, we need to overcome those trade-offs, for example, between privacy and public health during the pandemic or between the freedom of speech and public safety when it comes to infodemic and so on. So overcoming those seeming trade-offs, turning conflict into co-creation, that’s another thing that I would like to highlight.

Because for Taiwan, it really is a culture now here that everybody just instinctively turns into this co-creative solution. We see very little polarization, the kind that plagued other liberal democracies, especially close to the election. We’re not seeing the same degree of polarization in Taiwan. So I think all of this is worth highlighting.

Well, thank you very much. It’s really great to talk to you. Your final comment about how you see little polarization and contention in society that you see in others.

I think this is one of the great ironies of the current time, that it seems that the values that Europeans and Americans espouse, you’re doing your best to live by. I’m not sure that we are. So we are learning Enlightenment Europe.

I mean, how ironic is that? Enlightenment Europe is learning from Enlightenment Asia.

Well, we’re a younger democracy, so everything, including our constitution, has a sense of experimentation. We had less baggage.

I remember when Toomas Hendrik Ilves, previously president of Estonia, visited. He mentioned how Estonia, because they were founded around the same time as the modern day Estonia, they get to imagine their democracy in a way that is internet-native, and so is Taiwan.

So instead of being caught into a tradition that’s been practiced for 200 years, we don’t have that kind of liberal democratic tradition. So in ‘96, when Taiwan had our first direct presidential election, that’s already after the world wide web.

So from the very beginning, we imagined democracy with the possibility of a high bandwidth internet connectivity, which is quite different from a low bandwidth — like just voting every four years, uploading three bits every person — imagination.

So I think for research, for piloting, smaller polities like Taiwan or Estonia or Iceland is great, but the fruits of our research and pilot, I think, is freely shared.

So again: Taiwan can help.

Great, well thank you. It’s been a great honor to talk to you and I really appreciate the time. I will be in Taiwan probably from the 5th of January for a couple of weeks, so we may bump into each other.

It’d be a great honor if I could meet you in person, but otherwise I really appreciate the time you’ve given to me today and I’m very thankful, and to your office too.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.