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

Sure. OK.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

Aspirations?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I know.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s still very important.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ...

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?

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

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.

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.

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 ...