 Is the sound not coming through yes. Yes. Yes. It's good Yeah, I've got your sound. Okay. Excellent. They they say that the webcam here It's okay because they have a real camera Taking the footage. So this is just for the convenience Konnichiwa Ootori-san Hello, Ootori. Hello. Yeah, I'm very glad to see you. Me too. And talking with you. Yes. Yes And firstly, I want to ask you about the earthquake last night. Yes. Is there any damages? Not far as I can see but all my phones Received this national emergency warning. So it proves that the national emergency system is working really well See, it's good. Anyway, I'm very happy to talking with you. You are the person, one of the person who I most want to speak, see me in the world Excellent. Really glad to be talking with you. I understand we have a lot of time like two and a half hours to cover a wide range of topics. Yes. Yes, but you know, I Think you already recognize my English is not so good. No, it's very good. It's certainly better than my Nihongo Thank you. So Today I need some help For translate. So I want to introduce you our interpreter Okay Can you see, Sanae-san Hello Very nice meeting you. Yes. They are very, how to say, gifted, interpreted. So we can talk more deeper for them and they're very good to, good to mutual understanding giving our time. Excellent. Thank you so much. I also work as a interpreter myself. So I understand that I will now speak in roughly this speech. Speak in roughly this speed to make your life easier Thank you. Thank you very much. So They are ready to for another room. Okay, can you see? Okay Uh, can you see that this studio? This is a TBS G studio. Can you see? I see only one part of it, the blue wall But yes, I can see many screens arranged in a kind of U-shape around you. So it's very nice Well, it's a book about me. It's not my book Certainly, I don't get royalties from its sales, but it is of course the work of the president's press and very diligent editors So I believe you are the most famous Taiwanese in Japan Yeah, I get a translation. Yeah, I can hear now the translation very well. Thank you So you are the most famous Taiwanese in Japan Okay Today probably it's going to be slightly different from the normal interview So our TV program as our last program for this year We are going to feature US-China relationship, which is a huge topic for Japanese people so When there's some change in US and China relationship the Taiwan is a country which gets the the highest impact, I believe so now there's tension between US and China and especially there's a tension of IT industries especially they're related to 5g so you uh IT specialist So that is why we ask you to Join the conversation with us for our TV program this time It's my honor to start off What do you see the the country or what do you see the nation? What is a meaning of state for you To me, uh, I'm digital minister dot tw. So, uh, dot tw is the domain name It's cctld meaning that it's country specific like dot jp If I'm going to Enter digital minister dot tw anywhere in the world I'm connecting back to a computer that I know and actually personally installed when I become digital minister I recompile the linux kernel so that we can run The systems that host the digital services and so this reliability of typing digital minister dot tw anywhere in the world Regardless of jurisdiction and connect back to a computer that I am Trusting myself to set up. Uh, this is one of the meanings of the cctld that is to say the country So the the country you imagine is a slightly different from the idea of country we imagine well, I see myself as A internet governance, um, kind of ambassador To the day-to-day west valiant politics So I always say that I'm working with the government here the cabinet that I'm not working for the cabinet here I'm working with the people in taiwan But I'm not working for the people in taiwan I'm working with the internet community Which has this idea of rough consensus and open multi stakeholderism That is the political norm that I belong to and I of course negotiate with co-governance Such as countries on one side But also facebook and google on the other side, which are also co-governance And it's a political reality Although dot google is not a country name. It is a domain I see So that is some sort of existing which uh, which is um over the countries, um, I would say Yeah, it's uh, as I said co-governance. Yes, like co-processors gpu and cpu However Now when we look at the reality There's a conflict between the us and china And the there's also of attention For that and also that we are worrying about the negative impacts are coming from that conflict. So how do you see that? Well, you mentioned that taiwan, um, is the country with the most Tension, uh, just yesterday We were having this earthquake like literally caught between the duration plate on one side and the philippine sea plate on the other And the tension released a lot of energy And uh, we unfortunately, uh, design resilience in our buildings So nobody gets hurt, but the jade mountain or the saviyah the top of taiwan grow by another few millimeters Because of this earthquake it grows every year two or three centimeters So the idea is that conflict is not always bad Conflict makes people evaluate new innovations and new ideas and our moment of 4g infrastructure In 2014 is based on a very similar conversation that the rest of the world is having now Namely whether the beijing state subsidized components Can make its way through private sector to the taiwanese 4g infrastructure And we occupy the parliament for three weeks half a million people on the street many more online with 20 NGOs We deliberated over each and every aspect of the trade deal with beijing and one part of it is the telecommunication And the consensus on the street was that if we re-evaluate every time there's a firmware upgrade Every time there is a technological upgrade every time there's a cyber security Incident then we have to evaluate again whether the vendor that supported this upgrade has been taken over by the communist party of the beijing regime And if we keep evaluating that for each upgrade It's actually more expensive than working with japan or working with Nokia or ericsson as suppliers So the consensus on the street was very clear people rejected prc components from all sensitive Security including cyber security procurement So ever after that our 4g deployment contains zero percent prc components And it took us a couple years But we eventually by 2015 removed all beijing components from our infrastructure that powers our government service network And so the decision has been made the conversations already done So we did we didn't have this debate for 5g because we kind of did that already six years ago so now the world is Now the study to consider whether they should take chinese system to 5g or not So how do you see that situation from the specialist or the professional perspective? I'm not advising you to occupy your parliament. I'm not doing that But I am uh encouraging the same sort of all of society deliberation The same sort of systemic risk analysis Because the cost effectiveness is not just about the monetary cost It's also about a mortised cost for each upgrade and so on So my point is that it's not a top-down thing In 2014 the national security council and national communication commission in taiwan agreed on these rules Precisely because people who occupied the parliament won brought support from the society on this issue And so a similar all of society conversation is needed Of course every jurisdiction may draw different conclusions But regardless of conclusion this kind of conversation strengthens democracy so two years ago I've visited the headquarters far away in shenzhen And of course, they are the issue of security Especially the related to security of the 5g technologies. However, what they said was that They would not follow the communist party and if the communist party Would insist a far way to follow their direction and a far way said that they would be happy to move to other countries Do you think that this is the realistic scenarios at the far way would move to other countries if the communist party would insist them to follow the direction of the party? Well, their freedom of movement may not be guaranteed. We have seen The beijing regime essentially swapping leadership for other high-tech companies And so also for media companies like recently in hong kong And so we have seen several incidents That makes us worry about the options that the so-called private sector people if they are physically in the prc territory What kind of real options they actually have? so Yeah, they may say that and they may intentionally mean that but whether the state the communist state Will actually allow such thing to happen Just look at recent history and maybe you can draw your own conclusion So not only far away, but there are several So-called it companies in china and they do have a certain level of technologies. However Do you see them as a private company? What i'm trying to say is that if this is a one-time purchase If there is no need to upgrade the firmware or upgrade the software If this is after all not connected to the rest of the network infrastructure, then of course, I mean this musk Could be made in the prc territory and that's why I'll still put it on because it's not communication equipment I'm not Entire Chinese manufacturers what i'm trying to say is that for something that is telecom Component it is not a purchase of a product It is the beginning of a relationship of services and you need to understand the a more times long term Continuity and resilience of that particular relationship Taking into account for example your access to high-end semiconductor chips or things like that So it is a long-term decision to be made. Whereas a single purchase of a single product That's not connected to the net that doesn't have the upgrade path. This is actually one time use Then this is easier to evaluate than 5g components Oh Okay, uh, they say there's a problem with the sound so I will plug in a different Connection to ethernet and I will be back be right back Oh Is it better now? Can you can you see in here me? Yes, okay, the sound is better. Okay. Uh, well, let's continue then Okay Okay, let's continue. So on the other hand Probably the the US is going to have the new administration. So how Is there any expectation you have on the US new administration? Um, first of all, I think it is bipartisan In the us for the support To taiwan as a democratic country as well as establishing international solidarity With for example the global cooperation and training framework Which used to be a taiwan us partnership, but it's now a japan taiwan us partnership Issues as varied as you know the infodemic the pandemic climate change Circular economy, there's many many topics that we discuss over the gctf platform So I think there is a lot of continuity between the two different parties Regardless of whether it's the trump or the biden administration to keep working on those global topics Through this regional collaboration However talking about a president trump Probably the he was uh not um He was not a real anti-corporate of his um other countries. Um, so did you have that kind of the feeling as well? In the trump administration's term a lot of international space is not only shared With people in taiwan, but we also established a lot of bilateral communications For example the digital dialogue Which is a series of four conversations about people to people ties about security cooperation About how to make taiwan more uniquely seen in the world as well as about economic and prosperity trade Relationships and these are the first time that over the digital world The dot tw and dot us Did as conversation over the internet what I call track zero diplomacy Like uh internet citizen to internet citizen diplomacy and we look forward to continue that with the ait the de facto us embassy I also uh think um is by paterson people who supported the corona virus hackathon co-hack.tw Which is another uh transnational? Collaboration in co-hack co-hack the tw Where we work on how to counter the corona virus together through international collaboration and open innovation So, uh, I think uh from what I'm seeing in the digital realm. Um, it is again a bipartisan thing So I now have some question related to cobit 19 so Probably there's so many japanese people who would love to fly to taiwan now because At taiwan is doing very well in terms of the the prevention of the the pandemic Taiwan is successfully controlling the pandemic so you Did have some initiatives related to masks Which is something that should be shared around the world I believe and However as a platform World health organization is being a bit tough on taiwan probably there's a lot of pressure from the PLC However, now it's a very important time for the world. However, still wHO does not allow taiwan to attend The platform even as an observer country. So, what do you see this? attitude of wHO or the already the attitude of plc related to w to the ho Well, it's sad because Early on last december actually december 31st When dr. Lee wen liang's message reached taiwan He literally saved taiwan from wuhan But his message didn't reach that many people in wuhan in the beginning and on early january When we started First on the first of january health inspections for flights coming in from wuhan and early on the central epidemic month Santa even before we had the first confirmed case We tried to reach the wHO and all we had was limited scientific access to other country's science people But we do not have ministerial access meaning that we do not have access to other country's political authorities And so because of this I can say with certainty that the world lost 10 days because we responded 10 days before the wHO And had we had ministerial access maybe we would be able to convince some ministers that way With the scientific access. I mean in taiwan, of course our top expert of epidemiology at the time When he want to talk to the vice president He just look into the mirror because it's the same person dr. Chen jianren But other countries the top science actor may not be the top political actor in the You know different realms, right? So talking to the top scientist doesn't automatically translate into action on the ministerial parts So I mostly feel sad for an opportunity missed So when I speak to japanese people around myself so the way The china is dealing of this that which means that the ze Do you know the alo taiwan to Participate the wHO for them even as you observer We are not happy about that okay Okay, they are calling for a they're calling a stop here. I don't know why but your staff is now calling a stop Kiko kiko you kiko emasuka. So you don't know a no okiyama sonkara She's a man show car She must you go emasuka What are you doing? Ha ha you should always say you talk to a lie It's a new you can talk about your mother. Well, you know, that's the way that I want They put that on you. But she's not gonna say you're saying he's not supposed to see you can't do the show I can't go to school. You know, that's the whole goal He doesn't have to listen to me No, we have to record it, we have to broadcast it when it is recorded. Yes, so as long as I don't have to repeat it with his voice, then it's okay, right? That is, I wait for him to talk to me. Oh, you said you heard it. Maybe he said it was two officials recording it. So you won't be disturbed. I won't be disturbed, but if you need him to repeat it again, because you have to repeat it later, you don't need me to wait here. Oh, so it's okay. Okay, I'm sorry. Are you okay, Ms. Kusakabe? Yes, I didn't get disturbed. It doesn't matter. I'm just waiting for him to finish talking. I'll wait for him to finish talking for a second. The recording here must be clean. He was disturbed at that time. He recorded a reverse recording there. It's like he's talking to the air force. It's like he's asking if the recording is okay. The voice of the air force and the voice of the air force are coming from the PC of the tank, so there's no problem with the recording. But you can use my earphone too. I was originally going to use my earphone. You can use this one. So, on the other side, there's no problem. Yeah, there's no problem on my side as well. So as long as you can hear, it's always real, it's fine. And if there's no problem on your side, I'd like to just continue. It's not a problem on my side at all. I'm sorry that we have to stop the interview in the middle for several times. Okay, let's continue. So going back to the previous topic, the relationship between the states and China. This is the question I'd like to ask. Talking about Trump administration, as you said, when we look at a bilateral relationship with Taiwan and the US, probably the Trump was a good president. And also there was a lot of support of the Trump administration, the policy on Taiwan. And now it's changing to Biden's administration and the program is there are some worries in Taiwan as well. Because there's the concern that there could be the concern that the focus of the US administration would be PLC instead of Taiwan. Do you have any concern like that? Personally, I think it's fine. And the reason why is that what we are working on nowadays as a kind of middle power in this region of the world is not just about being a geopolitical strategic point between the US and the CN, but rather the idea is that we are a broad, friendly relationship with not just Japan. Japan remains, of course, very important, but also we have the NSTAC, the New Zealand relationship, including our indigenous people with the New Zealand indigenous people. We've been to New Zealand three times, to Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch over the past few short years. And there's many regional powers that are now more and more looking at Taiwan as something that we can all grow our region on. For example, as I mentioned, the counter-pandemic effort, the counter-infodemic effort and things like that, we also consider very strong allies from the EU, the Czech Republic in particular, not only just visited Taiwan the head of their senate, even said that we are Taiwanese and I am Taiwanese in our legislature. And so everything in the world, of course, revolves around the central idea of whether the democracies can keep being democracies, whether the modern challenges, such as this information, infodemic, can be overcome. And the democracies are resilient enough to be even more democratic after the pandemic and infodemic, or are some of them tempted to go back to the authoritarian ideas. Now, as long as the general trend is not toward authoritarianism, I think Taiwan has many allies in the world, and I think that is actually also the Biden administration's idea, which is that democratic countries uniting together in a multi-stakeholder fashion, they even talk about a democracy summit right within the first year and the open government partnership which Taiwan is now working actively, I personally participated in the previous summits, as well as online on the open response and open recovery. Again, the open government partnership is something that was started when Biden was vice president. And so there's a lot of common values for the Biden administration as well as the previous Trump administration as well. So I think we are in a pretty good place and I feel rather good about it. So probably IT technology is one of the things that encouraged Taiwan's good position because now you have a lot of the communication. You are very good at it. Taiwan is now very good at the delivering the message by using IT technology. Yes, that is certainly true. As I mentioned, the realm of international freedom of .tw, the domain is actually very wide and I participated as digitalminister.tw not only as part of the APEC conversation, but also at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Geneva as a robot because they don't check passports for robots. There are many more ways to participate meaningfully internationally outside of the traditional Westphalian ideas. So I visited Taiwan for the first time in 1994 at a time so there was the the remains of the order time since there was also a list election on the media's activity as well. And also the intervention from the army as well, the military as well. And there were lots of difficulties in the activities of the media's. However, when I look at Taiwan as of today, Taiwan has changed so much this February so actually the last the country I visited the country I visited before the pandemic was Taiwan it was this February and because we have our problem featured on the the nuclear the power plants because and I personally saw that what Taiwan is doing related to the nuclear related area is something that the other countries should refer to as well. That was my personal feeling after I visited there. Thank you for sharing I returned to Taiwan after spending some time in Germany as well and that was 1993 and so I agree that the Taiwan that I returned to I was full of this ideas that if children in Germany can grow up being treated as adults instead of as like blindly obedient school children then certainly one day the children in Taiwan can be brought up like this as well. I'm really happy to say as of last year our new curriculum is now in the basic education and all the children nowadays in Taiwan now enjoy this lifelong learning experience driven by autonomy interaction and the common good and certainly not the authoritarian idea of the one true answer from the one true party so you said a little bit about the sunflower with student movement actually I went inside of the parliament which was the taken by the students and the leader at the time Lin Fei Fang I met Lin Fei Fang and last year I met Lin Fei Fang as well so from your perspective sunflower student movement had a significant meaning according to what I've heard yes the sunflower movement made it cool for young people to talk about democracy and social justice previously the 20 NGOs each specializing in for example human rights, labor conditions new immigrants the fairness of trade well 4G cybersecurity so all these NGOs of course have their followers but the young people, the average young people on the street if you ask them whether they have went to the activity of any of those 20 NGOs it's quite unlikely actually that young people at the time were not paying a lot of attention on politics or on social justice it wasn't considered cool maybe they pay attention to it personally but they certainly don't talk about it on social media on the other hand after the occupy it became very cool to talk about social justice I think a lot of it is because the people who were only associated with one of the 20 NGOs suddenly discovered that there's just half a million people on the street many more online who care about this common wealth if you will this common polity and so they're now very eager to share whatever their idea is it could range from for example that we should gradually face our plastic straws for the bubble tea to we should put a bubble tea on the cover of our passport there's all sort of new ideas from the people as young as 15 or 16 years old not even at the age of voting but they drive the country forward they drive the future so young generation they were fighting for the future right? so at the time I was there in Taiwan and the older generations they said like it's important to have a good relationship with POC when you think about the daily life however young generation look at the future and if they kept the relationship with POC as it was and probably the China would overtake Taiwan which mean that the older generation was looking for the past or the present however the younger generation were looking for the future that is what I felt when I was there at the time of the sunflower movement indeed there was of course a generational wake up of the younger people as we call it here on the other hand those NGOs many of them are led by really senior people like people in their 80s or 70s and so even the 90s I think this is true intergenerational solidarity at play what really happens during the sunflower movement is that even though it is the young people that occupy the parliament it is the really senior people that already camped outside of the parliament to protest for many months by that time they paved the way for the young people to enter and they worked with the young people and broadcasted a lot of their messages through the live stream channels set up by the young people the old people there if not for the old guards that campaigned a legislature maybe the police will just evacuate the occupied students immediately on the first hour so really it is a generational solidarity as I felt the same way as well so at the time the Chinese Nationalist Party understood younger generation very well they were they showed their empathy to younger generation that is certainly true and what we are now looking at is an idea called reverse mentorship that was introduced after the sunflower movement again in 2014 so the KMC cabinet at the time decided that they need to learn from those young people that helped facilitating the sunflower movement and so some cabinet members worked with these young innovators and technologists in a reverse mentorship in a sense that it is us who point out the direction of the future while the senior members of the cabinet at the time helped to secure resources the ministers also Feng Yan was in charge of the reverse mentorship work and I was personally the reverse mentorship in this very office back in 2014 when I was 33 years old so now there's lots of things going on in Hong Kong and I assume that you are worrying about that as well and the reverse mentorship which you just mentioned do you think that the current Hong Kong government possibly has the same kind of idea well what we are now looking at is not something between the Hong Kong government and the people of Hong Kong or the young people of Hong Kong rather it is direct intervention from Beijing previously Beijing would try to go through the Hong Kong administration as kind of an intermediary and the kind of reverse mentorship especially after the city councilors election or the regional election it seems like a possibility but once Beijing directly intervened then I think the room for such interactions I wouldn't say it's gone, it's not gone it's still there but it requires much more trust from the administration side of the Hong Kong administration so today according to the media coverage Jimmy Lai who is a very famous one and actually he is now prosecuted so what do you think about that well I think the Taiwan democratization process is full of stories such as currently unfolding in Hong Kong and we used in the 80s because both my parents were journalists back when Taiwan was still under martial law sometimes we rely on the international correspondence in Hong Kong as well as the Hong Kong journalist themselves to report what's happening in Taiwan for the international community to pay attention to Taiwan and to demand human rights in Taiwan and for the Taiwan people who were exiled they couldn't return to Taiwan anymore to be given a stage to talk to the world through the lens of the Hong Kong correspondence well it seems like the situation is reversed nowadays we are of course providing the run not only for the reporter with our frontiers but also for the Oslo Freedom Forum not only for the NDI and IRI which operated in Hong Kong but retreated or relocated to Taiwan but also new foundations such as the Friedrich Naumann Foundation from Germany which now is also headquartering its Asia region chapter in Taiwan as well so what we are looking at is essentially like a mirror of a history of Taiwan's democratization process and of course there's a lot of sufferings but a lot of what we can do as the people who work in journalism in Hong Kong back then could do and did do for the Taiwanese people is to focus the international attention on what's really happening on the ground because without international attention well things get very bad very quickly so you just talked about your parents and your parents were journalists at the China Times right? Yes at Yu Ji Zhong's China Times so as far as I know the evaluation of Taiwanese people on China Times have changed dramatically the past 30 years what do you think about that? Well which is why I need to qualify it as Yu Ji Zhong's China Times and not the current owner of the franchise my father actually resigned immediately after the purchase and my mother of course quit when I was 8 years old so that was a long time ago and so yeah of course a lot of difference between Yu Ji Zhong's China Times which not only allowed my father to work on his personal capacity to visit Tiananmen in the protest of 89 and also reported with rather brave what's actually happening and he stayed in Tiananmen until the 1st of June and then Xu Zong Mao who took his place as a dispatch actually got hurt in the Tiananmen incident quite badly but of course nowadays under the current operator the current owner of China Times my father's reports back then and then Xu Zong Mao's reports back then if you look at ChinaTimes.com and enter those keywords you can't see it anymore and so that explains of course the difference in attitude the same thing is now or the similar thing is happening in Hong Kong now probably it moves so fast in Hong Kong compared to Taiwan yeah of course it is happening not actually irreversibly in Taiwan in Taiwan we have of course the absolute freedom of printed press and so there's more papers to read but of course in Hong Kong their publication rights is currently being tested and that is why it needs international attention Hong Kong so after it was written to China at the time it was one of the most open place around the world and the freedom of law which has supported Hong Kong but I was shocked because these kind of values were really easily swept away well I do not think is really swept away as a common value my main source of information about Hong Kong is Lian Deng or L I H K G and so maybe the mainstream media says one thing but L I H K G says something else so I guess this shows the resilience of the internet generation also it shows the resilience that when you can maintain secure communication in a pseudonymous configuration then the people who are interested in social justice and interested in creating the facts out that is to say journalistic work still are working on it I wouldn't say the value is swept away or it's gone a lot of people still care a lot in Hong Kong so even so now the voices of people is becoming smaller at this point of time however I do believe that it never vanishes it is true and it is thanks to the free software for example that we also use that offers into an encrypted video conference mode for example that will protect the identities of people who join for example book clubs reading books about democratization together and the like physical bookstore owners some of them are now setting up their shop in Taiwan and in their reading gatherings there is also democratic inclined workers when Taiwan was still under the martial law that is a really senior people who campaign for the democratization of Taiwan now joining those young people in Hong Kong in reading the books that they used to read during the democratization of Taiwan so again here there is generational solidarity and free software people including truly is our job to maintain that they have a safe and secure communication so that is something possible only because there is the information technology or the internet technology yes so through the internet you connect with people and when you talk about that you always talk about generosity I believe however when we look at what is happening on the planet it seems like we are losing generosity and it seems like people are becoming more and more hostile especially when I look at the conflict between the US and China I do have the kind of the feeling so what do you think of the importance of generosity on the internet which connects people to people an important idea is that we always must be liberal in what we accept and be conservative disciplined in what we send this is called a post-tales law a very important internet norm and on internet of course we are bound to meet people of all sort of different cultures but as long as they agree to the internet protocol eventually over the long time they do get into this idea of rough consensus that is to say the internet's ability to make new systems without the permission of the old systems the Royal Web never asked permission from Gover Ethereum never asked permission from Bitcoin so whenever there is a new generation of innovations and communications it could be made available to the people and the culture that actually requires it to function such as the book club I just mentioned and that is generosity this is the free software movement and so the main idea here I want to get across is that not everyone who lives in the .cn territory agree with the .cn official media's position on the kind of conflict that you were saying many of them really claim for the kind of civil society well except they cannot call it civil society social innovation to us that makes their life easier more autonomous more secure from the state surveillance there's many people working on that as well and so the people who connect to the internet as long as .cn is still part of the internet as still it's not gone from the internet then there is still hope for the people to connect to other people as people not as individuals subjects of the Westphalian order that is indeed as you said is in conflict so now going back to the subject of our country or nation so a country always think about national interest so that is why probably they like human relationship or that is why as they tend to look at a certain the people as the hostilities so in that sense the open society you mentioned so when I look at the situation of the world so that is the reverse of the the direction of the internet society or the idea of open society you just mentioned what you think about that well if you go to taiwangoatkar.com you can see that just this year along there's more than 1000 probably 2000 now by the time that this episode airs that there's foreign people who are not Taiwanese citizens who do not hold a passport of the trans-culture republic citizens and decide to stay in taiwan for up to three years on the gold card idea and it entitles them to not only work here, start a business here enjoy healthcare alongside their families but actually is available to anyone who for example have successfully run a startup to a to a public listed company that is to the entrepreneurs digital nomads they automatically qualify for the gold card and we have a lot of those people in taiwan now still working on their own subject but available here also as mentors to Taiwanese talents and if they stay here for a while because you can apply again on the second gold card turn on the fifth year for example many of them would then apply for naturalization and get a voting right here not just permanent residence but actually citizenship but we do not require them if they contribute well to our society we do not require them to renounce their original passport they can hold to that passport as well and become also Taiwanese and that I think is a concrete idea and the idea well implemented and actually well loved this year that many people look beyond the nationalist impulses and become defect to Taiwanese or also Taiwanese because they like the system here of healthcare of education of entrepreneurship so listening what you are saying in the past Taiwan was the land of nationalists I would say however now it is it is the very advanced area and now I feel like I am understanding bit by bit why Taiwan is becoming like this yeah well I just translated the official kanji name of the country Zhonghua Mingguo to the transcultural republic of citizens it is my own rendition this is not the official translation but it shows the kind of of the transculturalism that is Taiwan so on the other hand obviously Taiwan straight there is a country which has a technology however it is an authoritarian country which means that the IT technology is advancing however still the country is controlling everything so what do you think what would happen to that type of country in the future if we simplify AI could be made into authoritarian intelligence but in Taiwan AI could be made into assistive intelligence so it amplifies both the authoritarian instinct even to the degree of totalitarianism whereas previous totalitarian regimes were at most subtotal but now technologically it could be totally total but here as assistive technologists we are also perfecting AI to be assistive to be aligned with the privacy and dignity to be privacy preserving and also to be assistive in the sense of giving accountability so indeed one side is making the citizen transparent to the state and the other side making the state transparent to the citizens and the technology of course amplifies both instincts in your book you talked about Doraemon is the one of the ideal type of AI and actually I'm older for Doraemon's generation I don't know about Doraemon that much okay so what do you think so what do you think of Doraemon first of all although you do see me listed as author of that book I've not proofread that book and I don't get royalties it is a series of interviews that I publicly gave away the copyright so anybody can do whatever with it so it's a book an edited collection of the actual interviews that we did just like the interview that we are having now but I did not proofread its content on the other hand Doraemon I did talk about Doraemon many times I even played Doraemon in one of the films that's filmed by the Ministry of Economy Affairs in Taiwan my idea about the Doraemon is very simple each Doraemon episode shows how one technology if introduced to the society may invite surprisingly negative impacts and so a lot of the episode in the Doraemon is based on the idea of showing a little bit like in a sandbox how a new technology may interact with the society and ending up declaring that maybe the society is better off with only a fragment of the technology that is pro-social and maybe those technologies parts that are anti-social is not a good fit for the protagonist but you do not see like the Terminator series presiding over the other children even though the Doraemon certainly is a very capable robot they are already portraying all the assistive robots in an assistive role not in an authoritarian role so when I want to explain assistive intelligence like a very intelligent assistant Doraemon is of course a good example so probably because I don't know AI world well we tend to imagine George Orwell kind of world would happen in the future which means that the AI would dictate us so is there any possibility that the AI would dictate human being well in the George Orwell world AI does not dictate over people the big brother dictates over people through AI so AI does not enslave people people enslave people through AI and it is true today as well what we are now looking at is an unprecedented concentration of power it could be state surveillance it could also be surveillance capitalism if people give in to the norm of being surveilled all the time giving up their agency then of course it becomes terrifying but it's not the AIs that are terrifying it's the people using AIs in this way that are terrifying that's my response I see and when I talk with Chinese friends so there are several values we share with Taiwan such as democracy freedom transparency and open government and toward these values the Chinese friends would say that that was a value which were imposed by western countries and probably what is doing in China what the communist party does in China would better because now we are we have the prosperity and the other times there were people who were understandable to the western idea even though these people now say that kind of thing so now I feel there is the distance between my Chinese friends who say something like that so what do you think about this well certainly what they are saying which is a prosperity based narrative is true I mean it's based on facts it is true that they work very hard to transform people out of poverty and I'm not saying that it's not a worthy work of course it is a worthy work just as they through the use of lockdowns did manage in many provinces to counter the coronavirus and that is factual I'm not disputing that lockdowns especially when it's initiated early are useful what I'm trying to say is that there are alternatives that are better when we say we fight a pandemic with no lockdowns we didn't say we just let the virus run rampant we say that we run very careful communication campaigns that says wear a mask to protect your own face against your own hand it's rational self-interest it's not western I mean the mask is not eastern or western it is just a neutral technology a physical vaccine that protects my own face against my own hands by getting this message to pretty much everyone and by getting this message to be entirely non-partisan everybody in Taiwan understood the importance of it very early on and that enabled a lockdown free counter-pandemic effort which led to unprecedented growth on the retail and catering sectors for example so I'm not saying that lockdowns are not useful or I'm not saying that the takedowns, the encroachment on free press couldn't produce the effect the designer of the Great Firewall intended it to produce what I'm trying to say is just like takedowns lockdowns have adversarial externalities it reduces social trust people feel that they have to give up a lot more information than previously required in the name of the pandemic it hurts the civil society organizations' solidarity so it has externalities and Taiwan managed to fight a pandemic and infodemic during such externalities so maybe it is a good model, the Taiwan model to be learned worldwide and this is the argument I'm making I'm not saying that it's not useful to have a prosperous or to bring people out of poverty or to fight against the coronavirus through their particular fashion of ways I'm just pointing out the negative externalities you just mentioned infodemic sometimes I feel like the there is so much the information and when we look at what's going on in the state I wonder how many times we hear the word fake news so there are things such like fake news and the infodemic so what do you think of these kind of things infodemic and the fake news yeah I personally don't use the F word the fake news word quote-unquote because in Mandarin you see news is the same words as journalism so because they literally share the same word there is no way to say fake news in Mandarin without offending journalists like accusing them as imposters or producing misleading content and because as I mentioned and you know very well both my parents are journalists so I can't say the F word out of filial piety the respect of my parents rather we say this information intentional untruth that cause public harm and the way we frame it is that it must be intentional and it must harm the public if it only harm the image of a minister it's just good journalism but if it harms the health or harms the democratic institution like the voting system then of course it becomes this information and therefore subject to the kind of penalties the public prosecutions and so on so making a clear delineation of journalists and people who participate in journalists on one side and people who intentionally manipulate information to incite distrust and public harm on the other this delineation is very important without such delineation by using words such as fake news or Jiaxinwen in Mandarin then we risk confusing those two together and alienate or even attack the journalistic profession which is actually like the anti-bordy to the infodemic and so I don't make this word Jiaxinwen in any of my public speeches in English is a little bit better because news and journalism are two different words so our TV program depending on what we feature sometimes the we get the criticism on the internet that our program is biased and such I'm not saying that we do not hear the criticism on the internet however there are very clear criticism going on the internet to the old media because the internet so to say the anonymous space and sometimes I feel like there's the incorrect criticism on the old media so what do you think about that? I think everyone is media now everyone who has a phone especially in Taiwan where we have broadband as a human right so it costs just like 16 US dollars per month for unlimited connection in 4G so people might as well use more of it right if you live stream all the time you're essentially reporting what's going on around you so instead of saying the media people are the elites and the consumers of media need to have media literacy which is the old way of looking at things nowadays starting last year we teach media competence meaning that even for primary school people they need to understand that journalists are not just content producers the written journalism is not just producing text editors are not just text processors we need to first get the primary schoolers as well as the very senior people all the generations understanding what's the journalistic norm why is fact checking important why is bias detected early on through the framing effect important why is important to validate but protect your sources these are kind of 101 very basic of journalism but once people understand it's not just about producing content but rather it is engaging in collective fact finding that is to say journalism then we get much more high quality input they criticize because they care probably but if you show them how to contribute to journalism I'm sure like in the Taiwanese presidential debate and the platforms there's thousands of volunteers who volunteered to type the transcript of all the presidential candidates words to segment it into assertions and sentences to separate the factual claims with the feelings the personal observations and then fact check the factual things and publish it in a collective fashion and this fact checking mechanism is co-created by some of the oldest media such as hua shi and then also some established media such as gong shi the public TV but also the new media team within the public TV like the p-sharp lab as well as some truly internet as you said pseudonymous or anonymous people that contribute over the internet it's a beautiful collaboration to see so maybe we can think about given five minutes or even just 50 seconds if they can take the time to criticize your television online we can also help fact checking something so I'm learning a lot so we so to say the old media or mass media probably we were protected when there was no the internet so when we look at the New York Times the Washington Post the CNN so what they say is quite different from the general public as well and probably the reason and probably it's our responsibility the old media's responsibility that there's a huge gap between these two that is what I felt that's true and while of course your television is filming me in this dialogue we are also filming you filming me filming the camera right here and our film will be published to YouTube under Creative Commons and anyone can just collect that and make it into a rap song a band called those monos in Japan actually did that they took fragments of one of my interviews and remix it into a rap song and so this is I think what is really going on on the internet is that people are remixing a lot and if we encourage the norm around this pro-social sharing of creativity then it actually leads to everybody becoming more capable of engaging in journalism and democratic dialogue but if you do not give them the material to remix then of course people still feel in on whatever conspiracy theorists or whatever people who incite revenge or discrimination out of outrage I mean the desire for remixing material is always there but we need to actively engage them with the kind of material that we think are journalistic so our TV program actually in older days when we had an interview with the international guest we got the criticism that it is not possible to see it from overseas however it's possible to upload the contents after the air is done after it's being on air now it's for flea and it's on online which mean that finally now the via flea from the publishing light or the via flea from the any churches related to that that's right that the book you are holding is a testament to that I did not proofread the book I did not do anything other than saying I relinquish my copyright do whatever you want with it and then it became the kind of book that the editors imagination lead the book the curation of the book that's the book I was referring to there's another book called a letter to freedom it's done the same way so I think this is a new yes exactly yes you have both books both books I have no review rights and I agreed to dedicate all the dialogues and interviews that was the content of those books just like all my other interviews into the public domain which is why they can print me and my name on it but without royalty or without any fear of me suing them over copyright because I've relinquished my copyright already and so this is my vision basically offering everything that I work in the public sector as public material not just for the citizen of Taiwan but for everyone to remix not free from the various kind of thing for instance I say I'm free from a nation I'm not free from gender and I'm not free from long age there's the long age barrier between us and I'm not free from that on the other hand when our minister of health and welfare minister Chen Shizhong put on another rainbow mask a pink mask we become a little bit more free from the gender stereotypes everybody can be a little bit more freed so this is not about absolute freedom this is about flexibility of the mind Shizhong could you please talk a little bit about that pink mask event so back in April I think it was 12th of April there was a news that says a young boy called the CCC the 1922 that's the toll free number where the call center usually answers each and every question 95% of the questions answered about the epidemic however the young person was asking hey I'm a young boy all my classmates who are boys have blue masks to wear but when you're a rationale mask why is the case that we get only the pink medical mask and we don't get to pick the color I don't want to go to school to be the only boy that wears pink and the call center people don't know how to answer this question so it gets escalated immediately to the CCC now the very next day the next 2pm on the press conference live streamed and broadcast over TV all the medical officers regardless of gender wore pink and the minister even said that when he was a boy his idol was the pink panther so not only the boy become the most hip boy in his class for only he has the color that the heroes wear but also the heroes heroes and so the main idea here is that everyone can look beyond gender stereotype a little bit by performing as Judith Butler would say performing a little bit more transgender it frees everyone's imagination and for a while for at least a couple weeks all the trending bronze and so on in Taiwan all the fashion brands and so on if you look at their social media profile they're all pink pink became the most trendy color on the second half of April here of course eventually there's the pride parade and rainbow become very fashionable but sorry I digress the whole point is that making mask something that unifies people together instead of having this binary category of boys wearing blue mask and girls wear pink masks why don't we just say you know wear whatever color that you like pink panther is Mr. Chen's childhood idol why not and so that I think is a little bit more freedom but of course we wouldn't say that suddenly all the medical offices become transgender individuals that's maybe pushing it too far but they become a little bit more transgender that day so I love that story the pink mask story probably the Japanese a politician did not have the kind of the flexibility probably they cannot do that same kind of thing I don't know they can try it's fun and another thing that I remember from your book is that the when you were in Germany the Germans do not treat kids as kids which mean that the there's the kids close and there are certain the tools for kids which means that there's the separation between adults and kids indeed if children are treated as grown ups they grow up faster it's called the pygmalion effect so what was it like for you when you were young you stopped going to school and probably the I can say that it might be quite tough or probably sometime you felt some loneliness when I think of the society like Japan well I quit school because the head of my middle school said that after reviewing my exchange with researchers online she thinks my time is better spent online than go to her school so she said tomorrow you don't have to go to school anymore and I will cover for you by covering for me she means that she will fake the record to the ministry of education so I don't get fined for not showing up to compulsory education so this incident put in my mind this idea that the public service the career public servants are the most innovative people in the world and I can't shake out that feeling it's ingrained in my mind so public sector innovation is a real thing and so with the head of school's blessing of course I joined the internet research community working on free software and so on but that makes me actually more socialized and less alone because I feel that's no matter where I am in which ever jurisdiction it could be authoritarian regime but there are still free software activists in that regime working together on a better more solidarity oriented world and so I wouldn't say it's isolation or loneliness so what would be the ideal the public servant well obviously the ideal public servant is one that facilitates cross sectoral communication that is to say entirely horizontal instead of being top down like requiring each sectoral stakeholders to communicate only through the central authority and actually Minister Chen Shizhong is a really good role model of a civil servant that works in a horizontal way no matter how ridiculous the suggestion is from 1922 no matter how weird the question seem to be from the reporters asking him questions he always goes like yeah it's a great idea we should think about this together oh legislator please teach me right so he has always this humility that says even if he is notionally commander of the CECC as soon as you have a better idea that he have not thought to connect you with the career public service to implement your idea it could be the pink mask it could be pink panther it could be using traditional rice cookers to cook the mask to kill the virus but doesn't kill the mask and even though it sounds absurd Minister Chen actually cooked a mask on the live streamed press conference while Professor Leitrin you the social innovator explained the theory all this shows that a horizontally connected facilitative minister how that actually unifies the entire country when countering the pandemic rather than a very totalitarian one so now we are talking quite a long time but let me go back to the beginning or the starting point of this interview when we looked at two superpowers China and the states we see that there is the tendency which is not tolerant and how we should deal with them one very concrete idea is that we need to work on common problems that are too big for a single superpower to fix infodemic is actually a really good topic on this particular regard .cn that's to say the PRC regime spends more budget than its defense budget on fighting the infodemic it's a known fact they say it publicly that they spent a lot of effort and energy on harmonization and the infodemic of course also threatens the journalistic profession but what's more general at democracy is the more threatened existing journalistic players are from the infodemic this is also true and you already outlined how the old media is being pressured by the infodemic sometimes toxic content on the public internet so it seems that even for the authoritarian regimes like the PRC as long as they don't disconnect the harmonization thing is going to be a pressure for them and for the liberal democracies what we are doing now is essentially developing our own antibodies to each and every assault to the general population that tries to incite polarization and so on so maybe some sort of collaboration is possible here some sort of like covex of the mind so sharing the antibodies whereas we understand of course the playbook of a very cute spoke stock that's on Chai recommending people to wear a mask by showing cute Shiba Inus maybe it's not for everyone but certainly the Shiba Inu doesn't care whether it's authoritarian or whether it's liberal or social democracy so on those very concrete issues about the infodemic for example maybe we can agree on a package of norms around behavior to protect the core of the internet from state based meddling and also to conduct understanding over the internet that are more pro-social but not of course authoritarian so these are one concrete topic after the pandemic I guess everyone will shift their attention to how to do better on SARS 3.0 on the next pandemic and infodemic resilience I think is one such idea that everyone can collaborate and contribute regardless of whether they are authoritarian or democratic for instance in case of the United States they advocate in democracy however especially after Trump administration they put America first which means they regularly build in the walls and the same kind of the movement is happening in Brazil or even in Japan so what do you think the situation well sometimes wars are important like this is a war between my nose and my own hand and so sometimes it exists for a good reason however those sort of wars need to be evaluated over time we understood of course masks are important against the virus we understood humor is important to counter the infodemic on the other hand the sort of the wars in our minds for example nationalist agenda it could be directed into something that is beneficial like co-creation of a common value this is good and eventually just like the masks the rainbow and pink colors it does build solidarity on the other hand if nationalism is directed toward vengeful attack to other nations or whether it's for discrimination of other nations then of course that is less than good so I'm not saying that nationalistic tendencies or even some competition is necessarily a bad thing if it's so bad we will not have Olympic games which is a nationalist thing but to direct it to more pro-social and also more co-creative which is so this information technology which has a lot of the future possibilities and I think now China and US are fighting over information technology so do you see any positive things out of it or there's more negative outcome out of it well there's a lot of different norms right so the data norms for example that are currently debated it could concentrate all the data to the state which is the PRC model surveillance capitalism which was the US model but now the US government the both parties actually are waking up to it especially California has been doing something to counter surveillance capitalism and the EU which is a human rights based way like the GDPR which as I understand Japan and Taiwan are actually thinking more alongside the GDPR terms when it comes to data norms so maybe we are honorary Europeans in that regard so in any case what I'm trying to say is that there's more than one ways to solve a problem and the competition currently we are seeing around the norms is very important that we are not caught in the zero sun thinking of whether it's state or the capitalists owning all the data that that's not a good tendency to think rather I would advocate for example a social sector first approach to data norms actually in Japan there is an enabling act called the nation bank that talks about a trusted intermediary and the EU is doing the same on the data gov act and so on so maybe we can build a norm that combines the best of the two models together the efficiency and the trustworthiness without the bad parts of the CN and the US models and that is innovation and that could be good a good result from this competition so having various choices in order to do so disclosure or transparency is essential isn't it the state need to be transparent to its citizens when making decisions certainly the citizen probably not transparent to the state so could you please elaborate a bit more about that certainly so when we talk about radical transparency I mean that the cameras are pointed on me I'm not pointing my camera to the staff that you have here right so their privacy is preserved and so this is quite symbolic if people can all understand what their ministers is doing then they are much more active as citizens because they understand the limitations the brainstorming as well as the early stage drafts that the minister is working with and they often have better than minister ideas which I was just talking about with minister Chen Shizong he always says oh you know better please let's work together right so that's the good thing about making the state transparent to its citizens on the other hand the citizen have a right to self determination when it comes to the privacy boundaries so if the citizen is forced to make themselves known to the state even when they don't want to then of course it creates a power imbalance and then the state can essentially force a citizen to do things they don't want to do without invoking the rule of law they can just invoke some algorithm and the citizen will have to do whatever the state want the citizen to do we see that in PRC especially in Xinjiang all the time and so I think the main point here is that I would say citizen oriented policy making always make the state transparent but the citizen can be as opaque or transparent as they want to be any point in time so what Beijing is doing is that they go into the hidden area however at the same time they ask people to expose as themselves to the general public yes and they call it quote-unquote social credit and each provincial government under the umbrella of social credit could invent new ways for algorithm for code essentially to surpass the code of law the code of algorithms could dictate whose preferential treatment on household registration who get to take an airplane who doesn't get to take an airplane who takes the priority on the high speed rails who couldn't even book the higher classes of cabins and high speed rails and so on and so all in all this is a system that exposes as you said people to one another by encouraging people actually sometimes to snitch on one another and Taiwan actually knows about this 40 years ago we were like this 50 years ago but when I go to Shenzhen there are people looking for huge companies like Huawei or Tencent and I feel like young people they are very vibrant so aren't they what do you think about that they are, they certainly are and I think of course the young people especially like the really young people I'm talking about like teenagers or in the early 20s for them the firewall is already there as part of their life the kind of harmonization of social media content what they didn't know anything else right so for them is a natural habitat they were born into a post great firewall internet environment some of them of course especially if they work at Huawei or Tencent eventually learn how to use AVPN although it's of questionable legality nowadays but many of them of course took whatever situation there as natural because that's human nature on the other hand if you are talking about people in their 30s or 40s who briefly remember the kind of time where the great firewall wasn't that great at all then they of course notice something is amiss something is lost there I'm confirming talking to this stuff if there is any additional question or not so thank you very much for joining us for such a long hours is there any the message or is there anything that you would like to deliver to the audience if any well I would just sign off with my usual greeting which is live long and prosper that's perfect thank you high five thank you very much one thing one thing one more thing so the anchor woman of our TV program she is very much interested in the agenda the related topics and probably the next year she would love to talk with you so which means that we will be sending you another letter to ask you to join our TV program in the future okay okay I'm sure by next year there will still be gender in Taiwan although our new ID card doesn't even have a gender here anymore but this is our new ID card and it only has the name and the number but it doesn't say anything about genders and spouse field is gone as well it only says you're married or single so people cannot tell your sexual orientation by looking at your name and your spouse's name so we are moving gradually to a post gender society not immediately but very gradually so I'm happy to talk about that as well next year so actually I wanted you to meet face to face in Taipei rather than having this remote interview definitely I mean as soon as we have the vaccine which is why I mentioned COVAX as soon as the COVAX batch arrives then we are going to meet face to face so maybe by March or April we'll know so I'd like to eat a tasty Taiwanese food I can't wait definitely definitely we'll have some maybe bubble tea with sushi so thank you very much for sharing your time with us thank you thank you hello thank you thank you