Keep it burning. Thank you.

That’s why I like coming to Taiwan. You’re the pilot light of freedom in Asia.

Good. Thank you.

One last question. Are you optimistic about the future of democracy and human rights here in Asia? I’m thinking Mainland China, Vietnam, other countries that are more closed societies here.

I’m very grateful. Very interesting conversation. Thank you very much.

You’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you very much, Minister.

It’s speculative?

Are they regulated by central banks?

It’ll be an addition to.

Will it replace real currencies?

Are people using them today? If I want to go to a store, can I use digital currencies to buy stuff?

Let me ask you about digital currencies, blockchain, Bitcoin and digital currencies. Are you going to see an adaptation of digital currencies here in Taiwan here in the future?

That’s amazing.

How about in terms of how the government operates? Taiwan has had an enormous amount of success having a knowledge-based creative economy, ICT. Various parts of its economy are based on that. There are a series of digital disruptions coming. How is the government preparing, enabling, or supporting transitions that ...

Is this creating a backlash among parents?

Isn’t that radical in Asia?

That’s radical.

How is education going to have to change in this world, where digital disruptions are disrupting business models?

The idiom, and the subtlety, and the nuance between the lines.

[laughs] Maybe in…I don’t know.

That may be going away, too.

That may be going away, too.

A printer was a job.

Yeah, about 50 years ago, or 70 years ago the calculator was a job. Computer was a job.

Right, stenographer pools, typist pools.

To auto mobiles and….

That’s an easy question. [laughs]

Sorry, are you worried about people losing jobs to robots?

Yeah, I’m talking about, how is education going to have to change…

How about the…?

If you’ve got to set up a shared value, what you’re offering is more exportable. Is that basically what you’re saying?

Much lower.

Nearby jurisdiction.

Nobody wants to have milk that poisons their children or makes them go blind like what just happened in, as we all know, in other parts of the world.

Really? Food quality, or environmental pollution.

You have a very small space. If the air sucks, you don’t have any place else to go, right?

Can you talk about, how has digital…There seems to be, there’s a series of digital disruptions to the innovation-led economic growth model here in Taiwan? Talk about those disruptions, and how are government house education and how’s the private sector responding to these digital disruptions?

They don’t want to sell energy products, or they don’t want to sell agricultural commodities. Commodity based economies will only get you so far. For a country to escape the middle-income country trap, which Taiwan has done, you have to have an innovation-led economic-led growth model. You have to have ...

I think I was saying earlier, I don’t know if I’ve said this on this conversation, that as countries move up the development curve, what they want, maybe I said this at the very beginning, that they don’t want to sell rocks out of the ground like mining.

Let me come back to the issue of the creative economy and the digital economy here. It seems to me that Taiwan is making a series of big bets about its future.

I hear lots of arguments about China having an attractive model for authoritarian societies. I actually think it’s not very easily replicable.

It’s not exportable.

Changed the terms.

On personal freedom, their one-child policy, their sex-selective abortions, their lack of a creative economy, and we’ll come back to that, that ultimately, that they’re going to grow old before they grow rich, and the best outcome is that we have a Japan-style sort of a larger version of Japan ...

Let me try this out on you. I think there’s a lot of fear, this feels like the fear the United States had about Japan in the mid-‘80s,that we were going to be surpassed by Japan. I would posit that because of their censorship, and their lack of privacy, and ...

Is that coming any time soon?

How about the issue of mainland China making enormous, big, historic bets in AI, virtual reality, I don’t know, sort of fourth industrial revolution technologies, are you losing sleep about mainland China becoming the global leader in these technologies?

You’re not losing sleep about the 5G issue.

That was my lean. Taiwan can help. That was my thought is, Taiwan can help, minister.

Isn’t there someone else that can be a better systems integrator than them? There ought to be.