As they say in the Western world, we’re keeping our fingers crossed. Thanks so much for your time, once again, Minister. It’s been a real pleasure.
I look forward at some point to inviting you to talk to a wider audience here at Stanford, virtually and perhaps later in the year in the flesh. Thanks again, Minister, for your time and also the inspiration that you give those of us who would like to see a ...
That’s a brilliant note on which to end this interview. I’m extremely grateful to you for your time, particularly at a very fraught moment as Taiwan finally has to do lockdowns. I wish you every success in dealing with this and whatever the next problem is.
In January, in February, in March, nothing much was done whereas you were very quick in your response. Am I right to characterize your approach as one of general paranoia and speed of response rather than meticulous preparation for a limited number of contingencies?
It seems to me that you personify an approach to public policy problems that emphasizes speed of response and also crowdsourcing of information. Did Taiwan have a pandemic preparedness plan? I’m struck by the fact that the US had a very elaborate one, and so did the UK, and these ...
I know how busy you are, so I won’t keep you much longer, but I want to ask a final and general question. I’ve tried to argue in this book and in interviews I’ve done that it’s better to be generally paranoid and quick in your response than to be ...
As I understand it, the problem that’s come up is the shortage of testing capacity. This is based on talking to some people in Taiwan. Would it be fair to say that the government became overconfident about its COVID strategy and relaxed when it could have been doing more to ...
Let me now turn in the remaining time to talk about the new outbreak that appears to have come in because of the pilots from abroad. How confident are you feeling about Taiwan’s ability to contain this outbreak, and what should I be watching out for as I try to ...
I wanted you to spell that out, because it’s often misunderstood that in effect we already have these identifiers in our devices, and therefore, you may not need a…
Do you think it’s essential to have the identity card associated with the healthcare system to do what you’re doing? In the UK there’s a deep resistance to the idea of national identity cards. Could one nevertheless function and get a system like the one you’re describing to work without ...
Do you have a good answer to those people who are just inherently suspicious of the kind of solutions that you’ve developed? How can we maybe change American minds on this question?
This is the stumbling block in the United States: arguments about using technology to deal with public health crises or other crises always seem to get bogged down in rather crude arguments about civil liberties.
If you take a step back and reflect on what you’ve achieved since you became a minister, you’ve said in other interviews I’ve read that it’s about empowering citizens, not the state. How do you think about the issue of data privacy?
When you look at the performance of Western countries last year, it’s strange to me how few were able to learn from what you were doing in Taiwan. Is that because people in the West just don’t pay enough attention to Taiwan and were busy learning lessons from the Mainland ...
Am I right in thinking that, in Taiwan, contact tracing was not done through an app, because there was never the need to scale it up that much, or did you have a contact-tracing app as well?
If you look back on the reasons for Taiwan’s successful containment of the virus last year, what other policies do you think were crucial? I’m thinking here of more straightforward things like travel restrictions from the Mainland or testing. How important were those different things, and to whom should we ...
How important was your work on technology and particularly the empowering of citizens when the pandemic struck? I’m just curious to look back on January of 2020, when an election was the main issue. When did you personally first realize that there might be a public health crisis, and what ...
This is a broad feature of Taiwan’s situation. It has to be paranoid. You’ve made it a more technologically nimble government in a whole range of ways.
My first question relates to the early phase of the pandemic. In my book, “Doom”, I argue that Taiwan got this right in a number of different ways. The general argument is that Taiwan has to be quick in its response to any threat emanating from the Mainland.
