 for this interview. Definitely. Let's get started. Taiwan has been praised for its use of technology and fighting the pandemic. And many people have asked this question, what can Europe learn from Taiwan? Now, if we take, for example, the electronic fence that seems to be quite a good means to enforce home quarantine, but to a German public, it would probably not be acceptable. So why do we use home quarantine? You don't have to choose home quarantine. I mean, it's your choice. But could you explain why in Taiwan it's not controversial, actually? Well, if you do not like the idea of the digital fence, you can always choose to spend the entire 14 days in a quarantine hotel. It's not mandatory. But if you choose to spend the second week of the 14 days in your home, then basically, because people understand how it works, it's not based on difficult to understand new technologies, such as, I don't know, Bluetooth or things like that, GPS or things like that. It's based on a very simple idea of SMS. And people generally understand SMS. And the idea that we all receive earthquake warnings a few seconds in advance or flood evacuation warnings and so on also informs people that the fence idea is that we can send targeted SMS based on your distance to certain telecom towers. So people already had experience something like that before the pandemic. The heuristic was that if we invent new data collection or touch points that didn't exist before the pandemic, then naturally, the cybersecurity and privacy boundaries is a mystery and people would kind of have a lot of fear and uncertainty and doubts. But because Taiwan never entered a state of emergency, we just reuse components that exist well before the pandemic, the National Health Insurance Card, SMS, QR code and so on, which are very easily understood. If we look at how you trace contacts, that system has been developed in a very short time by civic groups, if I'm in full correct. If we look at three days, if we look at Germany, these took months of discussion. And then in the end, once it was ready, it wasn't really accepted by a broad part of society. What is there in Taiwan that makes this possible? What is the difference? Well, first of all, the group that invented GZero v. Ark of Zero has a track record of what we call forking the government, taking government service that didn't work so well and making better version of it. It's essentially the same community that created the mass creation and visualization early 2020. So exactly one year later, or so May 2021, they worked on the SMS based contact tracing. So they're well trusted by the civil service. That's the first thing. And the second is that it's not an app. If we ask people to download a new app, we will probably face the same pushback as seen in Germany, but it's not an app. It's literally you're built in camera in your phone pointing to a QR code. It pops up the SMS interface, sending to 1922, which is a well-known toll free number. And people understand these 15 digits is a random code. It doesn't actually give your phone number to the venue owner, to the shop owner. The shop owner knows nothing about your phone number or any contact details. So basically by choosing privacy enhancing technology, in this case, decentralized storage, we made sure that it's a net win for privacy as compared to, for example, if you write your phone number and in a piece of paper, I hand it to the venue, which is always available, like home quarantine versus hotel quarantine. If you don't like the idea of sending SMS, you can always go back to use paper stamping or writing your way in. So people who feel that the new way is more secure or more private naturally chose the new way maybe because it's faster, it's easier to explain. Also it's friendly to people who don't have the experience of scanning with your phone's camera because if you have a flip phone, like I do here, here's a flip phone, I can actually point this to the QR code, but if I don't know how to use it, I can manually text the 15 digits to 1922. So there's no mystery. Again, there's nothing like NFC exchanging unseen signals behind my back, Bluetooth, how does it work, right? It's very transparent. People know exactly what's going on. They just send a 15 digit to the SMS. So the explainability helps on the legitimacy. Now, finally, because it's the human right groups and so on are also part of GovZero. So they demanded very early on that it's, whenever you scan a QR code, the SMS contains this text. It must be used for epidemic control only. And so you can't, for example, get advertisement or whatever other use to it and only contact tracers can access the actual record. Everyone else just have the charts, the individual pieces that doesn't by itself compromise privacy. So the access and the use is restricted and people can't help us to account by going into a website SMS.1922.gov.tw to see the transparency report, to see the statistics of its deletion after 28 days and also entering your own numbers to get it for reverse audit of which contact tracing, which municipality have access to your record. Understand the German system does that too. So maybe on that regard, we have the same concerns by the first two, right? The civic tech group that's well trusted and the choice of technology that's easily understood and explained. I think that's what made the difference. You have successfully promoted digital democracy in Taiwan. We have similar groups actually with similar ideas, I'm sure you've heard about the Pirates Party, for example, but they have limited influence in Germany. What is there in Taiwan democracy? And now I really mean not the technical part, but the society, the kind of forces that shape their understanding of democracy. What is there in Taiwan democracy that makes it more open to such kind of ideas? I think it's just because it's newer, right? When Taiwan got our first presidential election directly in 1996, it's already after the World Web, right? So it's like, if you ask the Estonian people, why can you get away with electronic public service without taking care of the paper legacy? And they're like, no, we didn't have a paper legacy, right? So basically having a newer democracy does help because when we democratized already or while it was there, people's imagination of democracy was already beyond traditional party politics and representative democracy. It's already part of, for example, the participatory budgeting or part of the local citizens initiatives, including referendums, many other democratic designs already exist online. And as we democratized, we naturally want to incorporate those what I call higher bandwidth and lower latency democratic methods into our democratization. So I think the fact that we didn't have 200 years or 300 years of a Republican nor democratic tradition actually helped here because then we see democracy as a kind of technology that we just learned how to use, but like semiconductors, you can improve it, right? You also in the past spoke about the sunflower movement as an important factor that shaped Taiwan's democracy. Can you explain a little bit what role it played? Certainly. So in 2014, March, the three week nonviolent occupy of the parliament was not just a demonstration against something, it was not just a protest, but it's a demonstration with the people, a demo, showing that half a million people on the street and many more online can actually deliberate reasonably and actually converge to a roughly acceptable consensus instead of going nowhere as many other occupied movement tend to be. And the main difference, I believe, is the use of the at that time very new live streaming documenting technologies, allowing people participating online. The professional facilitation, the orchestration of 20 or so NGOs each deliberating one aspect of the cross-strait service and trade agreement. Instead of out of focus conversations, this allowed for focused aspects, for example, around labor condition changes, around freedom of the press changes, around whether we want to have our 4G infrastructure to be captured by the so-called private sector from the PRC and things like that. And that led to actionable consensus. And then the occupier was a victory because the head of the parliament agreed upon those consensus items. And the point here is that people can then point at a proof of existence, right? If we can deliberate about this huge scope of CSSTA, certainly the comparatively smaller scope of Uber or Airbnb should be a piece of cake. Of course, it wasn't really a piece of cake, but it enabled this kind of political conversations. I wonder whether the fact that many countries are more, let's say comfortable with dealing with the Taiwanese civil society as compared to the government also plays a role in kind of strengthening the role of civil society in Taiwan. Yeah, that may actually be the case, certainly. And in Taiwan also, the social sector or civil society, the same thing. The social sector had a lot of legitimacy already, essentially doing zero-like things like providing government-like functions. But before the internet, the co-ops movement, social entrepreneurship, charity unions and so on, they're very active in Taiwan. So already we have a strongly trusted social sector even before we had our first presidential election. So in that sense, like around the turn of century, when we had a really large earthquake, that was just four years after our first presidential election, people tend to trust the local charity's number statistics instead of the government's numbers. So it enjoys a higher legitimacy compared to the administration that only had four years of popular mandate by the democratic theory, right? But the social sector had decades of mandate and that also helps. I was quite impressed at the 2020 elections. You have these huge rallies of people and people really, they go with it. Like, unfortunately, we don't have that in Germany. Is that also, and I've seen similar things in Hong Kong, there is really, unfortunately not anymore, but it's quite easy to kind of mobilize masses for the idea of democracy. Is that also, does that have to do with the closeness and the kind of daily threat from China? Well, of course, in Hong Kong's case, that's the case, certainly. I would agree with you. Taiwan is more complicated because the threat is not just from the PRC but rather from our own past, right? People who are at 40 years old or older, that's to say my age or older, we remember the martial law. I remember my parents being journalists having essentially no press freedom, right? The one ruling party need to approve the things that they do and they do what they can, of course, but of course it's very limited and there's no freedom to form new political parties and doubts my childhood. So people who remember that, of course, continue to struggle to fight for democracy because we know how easily we can't slide back to authoritarianism and we remember the battle days. It wasn't pleasant. And so I think that informs the current activity and mobilization because people, when we see the tendencies of going back to the authoritarian norms and so on it's a non-starter, for example, to censor speech on the internet because anything that will lead to that, either a political proposal from a member of the parliament or kind of de facto thing because we work with some so-called private sector, 4G suppliers or things like that, people will say, oh, that would enable the white terror, that would enable the dictatorship days again and then people would vote no and it become a political non-starter. So of course PRC is like a daily reminder lately of how that slide that was like, but even when around the 10th turn of century, up to say 2010 or so when PRC looks like it's becoming gradually more open, still our own authoritarian past reminds us that we need to keep struggling for democracy. Since you mentioned your parents, may I ask you what kind of experiences shaped your own political convictions? Yeah, so there were both journalists specializing in my mother-in-law, my father-in-politics, respectively in their graduate studies and of course our dinner table is talking about people kind of illegally forming a new political party and whether democratic progress, what does progress mean and things like that. So it's a very political dinner table and also part of my early experience involves participating in the environmental groups. My mom was one of the initiator of the Homemakers Union, initially a foundational advocacy group very quickly became a consumer co-op that fights for environmental justice and I remember going to trips to see the negative environmental externality caused by pollution learning about this whole, nowadays of course we'll call it circular economy that at the time there's no such term, right? So the basic idea that we were overtaxing the earth and we need to change our economy to be regenerative otherwise when I was eight, I understood that it would be, I'm at the kind of business end of environmental pollution and so on that the younger people will suffer more and so on. So before I kind of migrated to the internet when I was 12 years old, I already spent four or five years of time in the more kind of traditional analog including rallies and food trips and co-ops and unions and so on movement. So that also informs my own political understanding. And you also spend a year in Germany of course as a German media, we are interested in that. Is it true that you met Chinese dissidents with the experience of the Tiananmen movement? Yeah, that was my father's thesis, right? His thesis, PhD thesis in the Sachbergen University was the dynamic of communication between the student factions in the Tiananmen Square because he was at the Tiananmen Square until June the first, which is very fortunate I guess. And so he made friends with many exiles who fled to Germany, to France, Luxembourg, many nearby European places and because to complete his thesis, he need to figure out what actually happened, right? During the Tiananmen and so I remember occasionally his interview subjects will be invited to watch TV together and have dinner with us and they were Tiananmen exiles, certainly. Not so long after you've been to a German school, you dropped out of school, is there any connection? Or how was that experience for you to be in a German school? Well, I was in the Awe Schweizer Schule, a primary school when I was 11, right? So my classmates were 10 because I don't know any Germany, like France at the time and I don't speak German at all. So it's unlikely that I'll just go to Germany and enter a gymnasium, doesn't work that way. So I spent a year with people, one year my junior and that counts trust a lot with my experience in Taiwan the year before because when I was 10, I was spending time with people two years my senior because I was jumping grades and spending time in the sixth grade in a primary school. So theoretically that means that the people I meet in Taiwan should be at least one year or two more mature than the people I meet in Germany, my classmates. But it's not that like that. My German classmates were at least five or six years more mature, it seems to me, than my Taiwanese classmates. They were basically treated like young adults who have to take care of their own schedule, especially after 3 p.m., of course, in their activities and so on. Whereas in Taiwan, everybody go to, if not cram school, at least very long, studying hours on standardized answers and certainly not playing soccer, right? So basically is a very different outlook on how primary school age students should interact with their parents and adults and so on. And I feel there's a lot of autonomy and freedom to associate, to interact with adults just like adults in Germany. My mom wrote a book describing the German education system to the Taiwanese audience. So that also informed our education reform a few years down the line, because we generally understood if we treat teenagers as babies, then they don't mature. It's not a pigmalion effect. But if we treat teenagers as adults, like the people in Germany do, then they mature very quickly. You are actually a good example of how civil society and government cooperate in Taiwan. And I know you've been asked this before, but I found your answer so interesting that I'm asking you again. You are calling yourself anarchist, right? And at the same time, or conservative anarchist. You have to explain that as well, what it means. But at the same time, you are now a minister. You're part of the cabinet. How does that go together? I don't work for the government. I work with the government. I don't work for the people. I work with the people. So the part of anarchism is, or to a more American audience, I would say left libertarianism, but I prefer anarchism. Anarchism means that I don't do coercion, right? I don't force, give order, my colleagues to do anything. Everybody in my office is joined by voluntary association and I don't receive orders or coercions from the presidential premiers either, right? So the idea here is that I'm not here to kind of disrupt traditional institutions. So that's the small conservative part, but I'm making it very easy to start new kind of social institutions that's like a zero fork, the traditional institutions, meaning take the best part of it as materials, but then go ahead and do a different contact tracing, vaccination, working or mask rationing system beyond what the traditional institutions has to offer. So conservative in what I do, but I'm very liberal in what I enable people to do in the sense and again, purely in a way that's non-coercive. And the other members of the cabinet, do they feel comfortable with the idea that you're not working for the government? Sure, of course. Because I'm after a not bomb-throwing, right? I'm not that kind of anarchist. So they like the fact that by working digitally and working with not just for the people, the risk is lower because people don't just point out problems once we share the underlying data, API and information with the people. People who point out problems often just bring us solutions too. And so it flips the relationship around, I call it reverse procurement. We become like IT vendors because the people already figure out a solution and we just have to cover the SMS fee or something. So the point here is that it turns a relationship of distrust into a relationship of mutual trust and that lowers the risk for everyone involved and also it saves them time, instead of having to explain the problem. We just ask people who complain the most to co-create a solution and after all, you don't have to explain the problem anymore. Do you think there are limits to direct democracy? For example, when it comes to military budget, you wouldn't want to maybe the population to directly decide on the military budget. But that's because of the state secret that prevents people from being fully informed. And of course, if you are not fully informed, you can't do participatory budgeting. So of course, yes, there are limits to direct democracy. The MPs, if they don't have visibility into the defense plan, I'm sure they can't talk about defense budget either, right? So the limit is on the freedom of information involved and no matter whether it's for privacy reasons, for trade secret reasons, foreign defense reasons, as you pointed out, if you do not have the radically transparent data and information pipeline, of course, it's impossible to do direct democracy around that topic. I would like to talk a little bit about the dangers to Taiwanese democracy, mainly from the side of China. Recently, for example, China has threatened Taiwanese companies not to donate money to the DPP, for example. How much of a danger is that to the democracy? So far, I think the general consensus from the press here, the journalistic community is that, of course, it's quite symbolic, but currently it has negligible effect on our democratic institutions. And of course, we do understand that many a time it's not about the DPP or it's not about any particular political party. It's about trying to paint democracy as a kind of fundamentally less effective way of doing things. And authoritarian model is the only way to, I don't know, win against the pandemic or win against the infodamic and things like that. It's a kind of model-to-model comparison effect that they want to effect. And so I think in the past few years, we've seen Taiwan proving that more democracy is actually the answer to pandemic. More democracy is the answer to the infodamic because, for example, the same Omicron variant, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly and speech made sure that we get to know how's it going on very quickly because people generally trust each other with information. They don't not just obey the rules, so to speak, but understand the epidemiology principles that would enable, for example, sufficient contact tracing to be made very early in the domestic transmission. But in a place, in a jurisdiction that has little to none journalistic freedom or the incentive to do freedom of speech exercises because you could get harmonized, then the authorities, even with the best intention, learn about these things rather late in the game. That's why Dr. Lee Willow saved the Taiwanese people but not the people in Wuhan, that was the reason. So I think if people in Taiwan were kind of in doubt of the democratic model in response to emergency, the past couple of years kind of proved that no matter what symbolic actions other people from the more authoritarian regime take, the democratic model actually works pretty well. I know that Taiwan has a fascinating system of dealing with disinformation. How dangerous are these disinformation campaigns from China, actually? If I look at the English version, much of it is actually not very convincing and so far its impact hasn't reached the English-speaking world. How is that in Taiwan? Yeah, for example, there was one piece of viral disinformation in 2019, November or December about, and I quote, the young people in Hong Kong are being paid 20 million to murder police, end of quote. And a scary looking photo that says, this young person received this bouncy and bought some iPhones and recruited younger brothers to riot and kill police or whatever. So basically that there was a kind of viral thing going on in Taiwan and not in Hong Kong because they probably see it for its untruth very quickly. And the photo was real, it was a Reuters photo, but the original Reuters caption was just, there are young people in Hong Kong for this thing. This is nothing about being paid to kill police. And so the alternate caption has to come somewhere, right? And because we do have a pretty good advanced warning system that kind of let us see which disinformation are trending, are going viral, having a higher R value. So our fact checkers, independent, not state owned, tend to focus on the thing that are actually just about to go viral. And in this particular case, they trace this caption to the Central Political and Law Units Weibo account of the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. Now they're quite overt about it, it's not covert. And then the people took that caption from their Weibo and then remixed even more scary looking messages trying to increase its R value, I'm sure. So, but we didn't take anything down, rather we just put a public notice. So when you share it on social media and so on, it says according to the Taiwan Fact Check Center, this is sponsored by the CCP essentially in their Weibo. And so then it turns a viral vector into a viral vaccine of sorts, right? People would understand the message is there, but they will not blindly share it. They will share it within a different frame. And that's actually how mRNA vaccines work. They become immune to a few further information manipulation. So that's just one anecdote of issues how roughly our counter-disinformation tactics work. You speak a lot about trust. And at the same time, when we talk in Europe about the challenge of authoritarianism, there is a tendency to actually become less open, right? There are issues of, as you said before, national security or the concept of national security becomes broader. There are now issues of, for example, cooperation on the university side. And even as you can see in America, American professors are becoming the focus of these kind of fears. So how does this go together to be an open society and at the same time, you know, being faced with these kind of, because authoritarianism tends to misuse that openness, right? Yeah, this is a really great question. This is like asking, why are we not imposing travel restrictions domestically in Taiwan? Even when we had previous spikes of alpha and then later smaller scale delta and Omicron infections. Certainly when it's like really bad, then of course some restrictions of movement would probably be justified. And probably we will have to declare a state of emergency and then so on, but Taiwan never did that, right? In the past couple years, not a single day. And the reason is that at the early stage, we believe it's much more important that people understand how exactly this mask work, how hand washing works, how social distancing works, how good ventilation helps and things like that. So when the knowledge is open and when every day at 2 p.m., the CECC, the Central Epidemic Commence Center answers all the journalistic questions, the entire journalism community become kind of co-creators of counter-pandemic policies by reporting emerging issues, but also correcting the issues that the CECC wasn't doing properly and so on. And so before it got really bad, we controlled our value to be well below one, so it doesn't actually come to a point where we have to declare a lockdown and speaking both factually and metaphorically. So on information manipulation from authoritarian regimes, if it goes really, really bad, then of course some sort of more, you know, takedown-oriented approach, shadow ban or whatever, we'll probably enter the political discourse. But before that, if we can get people's idea of public mental health in the information space, that's a long way, let's just talk about journalism. If people learn about journalism and to learn about fact-checking, about the framing effect, and so what, they become immune to the discord that the authoritarians may exploit. So by increasing the people's internal defense, the antibodies of the mind, so to speak, by participating in media competence programs and fact-checking and so on as early as primary school and as long as the elderly in the lifelong education, people become much more immune to information manipulation and then because it never got really bad. So we don't have to go to drastic measures, we can then stay open. So I think we're quite fortunate that it worked like this because if it doesn't work, we probably will be forced to declare some sort of state of emergency. Yeah, but Taiwan does have some strict rules, for example, for former members of the administration when they want to go to China. So there are limits to openness, right? Certainly, because what I'm trying to talk about here is domestically, right, revealing the advertisement on social media during election seasons so that investigative journalists can draw their conclusions and look at, for example, foreign-sponsored advertisement and ban them, right? So it's not like we don't ban them. Well, as there's evidence that they're not as accountable as our domestic norm, of course we ban them and this is very much like border quarantine. So I'm talking about radical openness and democracy within the border, but of course that need to be coupled with a pretty good border quarantine. You have said that open democracy, Taiwan's open democracy has become an export product. Can you give an example of a country where actually they have taken something from you? Many things, and usually it's on the people-to-people way, not government-to-government, and you already pointed out why, so I will not elaborate. So, for example, the Demonstrationing Map last February after Taiwan implemented that, I think Seoul, South Korea, did exactly the same thing one month afterwards, essentially by their civic tech people. I've met some of them, they're as young as 12, I believe, who talk to the Korean government in municipality and say, you know, if Taiwan can do that and the code is already there, why don't we just join this way of visualizing the rationing system? So that's one. The collaborative fact-checking COVAX has been adopted by people in Thailand, of course, because of their civic space, they mostly, I believe, focus on kind of safe food safety and drug safety and issues that are not as political as the Hong Kong example I just pointed out, but it's still very useful and I'm sure that also helps their social sector against legitimacy. And for example, the way that we conduct the digital transformation by promoting design alongside data and deliberation and so on in the cabinet office in a cross-ministerial interagency way, I believe Japan ratified that in law last year and established their digital agency within the cabinet office and so on. And because I'm kind of mostly was having a conversation with the professor related to that effort, I'm pretty sure that they actually looked at our design for digital transformation within the government and incorporated many ideas there. And I can actually go on, but that was just some of the more recent memories. China's, sorry, Taiwan's contribution to democracy has also been acknowledged by being invited to that summit for democracy. Summit for democracy, yeah. At the same time, the summit also showed kind of the limits of Taiwan's engagement if I may give this example that when you gave your presentation kind of, it was turned from video to audio. Were you disappointed about this? Well, the thing is that contrary to many media reports, if you go back to that live stream, really the map was shown in its entirety and my opening speech was uninterrupted. It's 20 minutes after the map showed on the closing speech for two and a half minutes, did it become audio only? And I believe the reason why, because I've had a conversation with the technical people at the time, was that they thought that I would be using Zoom's share screen feature, I believe. But that wasn't what I was doing. I was essentially merging my slides into my camera feed. So there was a kind of misunderstanding at the control center, I believe, for this control. And then, of course, then it didn't quite work and so they just showed the audio. So and the slide that I was about to show that didn't get shown was this. It's a, let me just very quickly show it to you. So it's here, right? So I was like this and then like this. So as you can see, it's not a screen share. It's just, my camera suddenly changes content. So maybe they were not expecting that, right? But if you look at the actual content that I show, it's just air pollution map, right? It's PM 2.5. And I don't think there's anything geopolitical about this particular map. The underlying map is Google maps. And so I believe it's a technical glitch. I wasn't holding it to be associated with the previous map that Reuters reported. And I, of course, have a local recording that I uploaded to YouTube right afterwards. And right after the panel, I told the technician that I have a local copy. So it would be great if they just upload the full thing to their summit schedule page. And then I go to sleep. And when I wake up, it's on the schedule page, well before the Reuters report. So to me, that's already settled then. And I, but I must thank the Reuters report because I benefit from the so-called Stresen effect, right? So initially, there's not so many people listening to my talk. But after the Reuters report and this white circulation, including Twitter and many social media, my speeches have been listened to, I think immediately more than 200,000 times. And then much more afterwards. So I'm happy for the free exposure, I guess. But it's quite a bit, if I may ask this last question. I mean, this whole issue of maps is becoming more and more of an issue. How do you feel about this? This must be quite a nuisance. Oh, yeah, yeah, let's actually look at the map, right? So, yeah, and I think that the thing with this map was that it's really about the degree of democracy, a degree of the civic space and so on. And people will look at it very differently, of course, coming from different political backgrounds. For example, people from Hong Kong will note that Hong Kong is not painted red. And so Hong Kong is painted black, actually. So there's no sufficient information about Hong Kong that we can determine that civic space is in a unknown state, according to the civic monitor. And people who care about various different jurisdictional boundaries, of course, we will look into this. But I chose this map precisely because it's really a note about sovereignty and it's really just about a degree of civic freedom. And this also works in the same, I guess, idea as my chosen background, right? It's basically a real reflection of the light in the night, as seen by a space shuttle or a telescope or something from outer space. And I like maps like this that are less charged with geopolitical boundaries. Thank you very much, Minister Tan. Yeah, thank you. A really good question. Very nice talking to you. Yeah, thank you. So just to make sure, you will be publishing just a text, right? Not a video of this conversation. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And would you... But I guess you are publishing a video which may be very nervous. Would you be okay if I publish not your face, not your video feed? Just my... Oh, I see. You should have told me in the beginning I would have been less nervous then. Yeah, so, yeah, apologies. Because it's a new experience for me. Apologies. But it's totally fine, whatever you do. That's your... No, no, no, but it would just have your voice and then my video. And so you don't have to be that nervous. But do we need to embargo it like after you publish or is it fine if I just publish it now? It's fine. Okay. It's fine. Excellent. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. It was a fascinating talk. Bye-bye.