 So yeah, my first question, why has Taiwan been so exceptional in preventing the spread of the coronavirus? Sure, because everybody in Taiwan who's above 30 years old remember how bad SARS was and so when Dr. Lee Wenliang, the PRC was up lower, gets reposted on the Taiwan social media that there's seven new SARS confirmed cases. Everybody gets mobilized and so starting as early as January 1st, we started doing health inspections for flies from Wuhan to Taiwan. So we reacted fast and the PPE distribution was fair and also the communication was common collected and you got fun. So fast, fair, fun was the main reason. Okay, so I've spoken to different people. Some say that it was mainly attributable to what the government did but then other people just said that people had this experience with SARS. You can look at Hong Kong, they also had experience with SARS and I wouldn't say that their trust to their government is at the same level as Taiwanese people to the government but still they managed to do pretty well and so I think social sector mobilization by far is the main reason. But even now, I think Taiwan really stands out among all the other nations. Yeah, we were officially post-COVID and we're repurposing all the digital infrastructure we used to ration the mask to now do the triple stimulus vouchers. So we're firmly in the stimulus stage now. Okay, and then oh yeah, so then describe how Taiwan has implemented contact tracing. Sure, there's just regular contact tracing interviews and such. I think one of the things that really helped is that we have very strict border control because if you put your border control, for example the quarantine hotels at the border then you wouldn't need to spend extra personnel when it goes to a community spread stage. Taiwan never entered the community spread stage and we never imposed a lockdown and because we did very strict and early on very anticipatory. What they use here from people is this term called advanced deployment or Chao Qian Bu Shu. So we treat it as if everybody returning from overseas is sick. We treat it as if everyone who's returning citizen either go to a quarantine hotel or if they have a home where they live with no vulnerable people they can also choose to home quarantine but we also use the digital fence to make sure that their phone doesn't exceed the perimeter of their home quarantine for 14 days and just now we're very gradually starting to say okay so you if you fly in from say New Zealand we're headed more or less under control then we shorten the 14 day into five days but you still have to do a RTPCR test before boarding and after the quarantine. Okay, so let me see if I understand this correctly. I believe smartphones were also part of this contact crisis. If we go to the quarantine hotel of course there's a physical quarantine where you can't leave the hotel but if you choose to stay at home then yes your phone or if you don't have a phone we hand you a phone is basically the cell phone towers near you already collect the signal strength right so if you have three cell phone towers each knowing the distance to your phone and you draw three circles there's going to be one overlapping point and that's where your phone is but it's not GPS first of all it doesn't drain the battery GPS it's very energy consuming it doesn't require you to install any app it's the data that the cell phone operators are already collecting anyway and finally it has a precision roughly 15 meters in urban areas in GPS we would know exactly which room you're in in your home and that's like too much information we don't need that information we just need to know whether you have broken out of the currently or not if you choose to stay in the quarantine we pay you I think 33 US dollars per day a stipend but if you break it it's 1000 times that is a fine okay so how does this contrast with I don't know if you're familiar with what was done in Israel but there was some sort of Israel recently revealed that you know hey we've been we've been using smartphones to track people to prevent terrorism and we're now using the same technology to yeah it's it's not the same it's not the same use okay in Taiwan the kind of geo fans or what we call digital fans is used for two cases that people are familiar one is for earthquake if you are in a place where there's a high risk of landslide or whatever soon as earthquake happens actually before the earthquake actually gets felt you will receive this cell broadcast like a sms message that tells you to evacuate basically or when typhoon comes if you're in a place with a high chance of flood then people in that area also receive a sms so people already gets into the habit of receiving the kind of public service announcements for specific areas of population and so the geo fencing in the digital fence works similarly but it works basically by defining the rest of Taiwan you know other than your home uh as a dangerous area so once you break out of it not only you but also your household manager or the police receive the sms but it's the same idea so there's no extra data collection no apps need to be installed and it's very transparent people understand that once the 14 day parenting is over there's no constitutional basis for us to keep track of your whereabouts and so it's both space limited and also time okay so i think that pretty that explains pretty much how privacy is protected yeah and if you don't like the digital fence you can choose to go to a hotel okay okay all right and so what areas of government are you involved in in what ways do you help to shape policy yeah so i'm in charge of three things one is for social innovation for example when there's people who said oh i would like to visualize how many masks are available around my vicinity and that's social innovation because the government didn't think of that it is the people right so i'm in charge of amplifying their idea trusting citizens with open data ensuring the social innovation can continue to become essentially digital infrastructure nowadays these tools more than 140 enjoys more than i think 10 million users and all together of 23 million people in taiwan more than 21 million have collected using their national health insurance card the rations mask or is a is a big success more than 90 percent of people have done so the rest maybe they already have some musk in their store so they would instead use another app to basically dedicate their uncollected must quote out to international humanitarian aid so that's another thing right so these are social innovation because this starts from the civil society so that's one of my job the other job of mine is called open government is the other way around is a government responding to people's ideas saying okay now we have a consultation we would like you to suggest ways that our privacy in consign that doesn't hurt the privacy while helping to manage the code it so for example we run the co-hack which stands for corona virus hackathon or collaboration hackathon your choice but at co-hack.tw it's a joint taiwan us statement to counter coronavirus so we invite lots of teams around the world to vote on the ideas that conforms to the local norm that people feel are they're comfortable in implementing so out of the open government work came for example the idea that people can use their phone to check their own whereabouts but it doesn't sense through bluetooth or 4g or 5g or whatever it keeps strictly in the phone so it's works only for you and the reason why for that is called lockboard one of the winners of the co-hack hackathon the open government work is that because people feel if it serves their own best interest then they're willing to check their whereabouts and once the contact trace have come to them it generates this one-time link that the contact tracing know exactly the kind of information that medical offices need without divulging the privacy details of their friends and families as a traditional contact tracing interview would reveal so it's a privacy protecting tool so that's open government where we ask for consultations and ideas and finally i'm also in charge of youth engagement in which each of the ministries in charge of innovation like 12 of them have a higher really not higher a point to reverse mentors people who are under 35 years old who are their social entrepreneurs social innovators that leads the ministry's direction suggesting for example the world skills competition champion should be treated like olympic athletes champions on the national day parade and also teaching like high schools people so that they choose high schools specializing technique technical expertise as their first choice instead of just academic high schools as their first choice that's a really good idea and it's implemented through the youth council that basically has the premiere as the head that translates these young people's directions into feasible government plans that's my third portfolio so just stepping back a bit this open government initiative is actually a collaboration with people all over the world not just that's right yeah taiwan is just one of the the fields that we work and digital minister in taiwan but i'm also a board member of three international ngos furthering open government work in the future society also radio exchange foundation the council foundation in amsterdam and so on so we see us as a kind of coalition of the willing coalition of liberal democracies that look to basically make democracy grow stronger during the pandemic to make a more like real-time democracy instead of vote every four years democracy and we use the pandemic as a amplifier for people to feel that oh we're all stakeholders in this counter primary way so i've spoken to other people other ngos here in taiwan actually it seems to me that's one of taiwan's strongest expressions of soft power yes so it's interesting to me that you're also part of that of course yeah if you'd spoke to for example the taiwan association for human rights the thr they will gladly tell you that taiwan is the only jurisdiction in asia that enjoys the completely open rating from the civicus monitor in terms of the freedom to assemble freedom of speech freedom of journalism and things like that and even if you count asia pacific i think taiwan and new zealand are the only two which means that not only the reporter without borders have their asian headquarter here that also a freedom forum set up their annual conference here twice now and also the journalists that got um uh invited out uh from prc and the hong kong and the international ngos nowadays um just choose taiwan as their headquarter because really there is nowhere else that has the more free civice science that's fantastic um i i would actually like to talk to more ngos uh just to get a better sense of what taiwan is doing in that area um so how do you actually help to shape policy then here in taiwan yeah so as i said uh through open government that is to say the public consultations and hackathons through social innovation that is to say people have a great idea i just show it to our premier i say that we really need to support that okay and as that and also youth engagement these are the three main ways that i should policy uh and each ministry related to social innovation uh around 12 of them uh have secondment in my office okay so uh on your way in we're probably already past the secondments from the ministries of interior of culture of communication of justice of finance uh i'm missing a few foreign service and and so on and basically they agreed to work out loud meaning that they work in a very horizontal leadership way i don't give them scoring or rating or whatever uh but say uh work on cross-ministerial issues kind of autonomously okay so uh not now i know another initiative of yours is to make government transparent this should should the government be totally transparent i mean yeah i think government should be radically transparent and radical i mean at a root so for example my meeting with journalists uh i agree to publish this video uh after you do so i can embargo until your story runs okay so it's not like we livestream everything or if you choose to have a textual transcript you can go back and edit away the typos or add some references it's all okay as long as you don't touch my part of words so uh it basically it flips the default it makes radical transparency makes um transparency the default and you have to do some extra work to redact or to take away some anecdotes that you hear from your friend who have no clarity for complication and so on so all of this is allowed but a radical transparency makes the transparency the default okay but i mean certainly there are some areas in which government needs to be confidential also right i mean i'm sure and then you have 10 days or in case if you're uh public servant you have 10 working days to edit those out okay okay all right um yeah okay so i think you've explained pretty well how tywin tywin has successfully implemented transparency but are there are there some other areas which you think more effort needs to be made perhaps yeah sure uh in the parliament they just started their own open government network um opening up the parliament which is a very good development because we in the demonstration you know it's the uh we are making ourselves transparent to the people uh and also to the nps but we could not ask the np to be transparent to us right that would be the reversal of constitutional rules but if the nps and i think all four parties uh there are or five uh or or more but anyway uh all the different parties in parliament agree no matter what their ideologies are that uh open government is their kind of shared value uh and so they have their their own coalition of the open government partnership inspired multi-stakeholder uh forum to make themselves more open and you see already the same uh happening to the justice to the courts as well uh in taiwan we're in the next few years gradually uh introducing juries that is to say participating uh citizens which will again open up the field of the judges and so i think it's just not uh something that the demonstration can do it along we need support from other branches as well so so could could you explain at what stage each of these different uh efforts are sure yeah so um i think for the open justice part there's a lot of mock uh trials uh already uh involving participatory citizens like mock juries uh and i think they're now working on the kind of final legalization required uh to to make that a reality i think the goal is to implement it within dr siren one's second term uh and for open parliament again they just pass the resolution uh before the end of the previous session so we'll see a lot more activity in the next session so what does that mean to the typical citizen in taiwan if they want to see any sort of judicial proceedings or legislative proceedings online they can do that for example uh for unsafe driving which is a very popular thing driving under influence uh the oi there's many people who would question uh why do the judge rule so lightly on this um the oi incident uh funny how people don't ask why they judge so strongly but anyway so uh so and so because of that uh the uh court uh the what we call the judicial yuan uh the judicial branch developed this assistive intelligence and ai that basically lets you click uh any driving under influence case and it analyzed to you using natural language parsing which part of the persecution corresponds to which clauses in the driving under influence rule and so that's results in this sentencing and you can try it out and compare how similar like these different cases are and so instead of explaining over and over again why do we judge this way or that way it's actually also very useful for judges so who can see how this case compares to every other cases of course they can always override the assistive intelligence but then they have to specify why and so i think that is a really good case in which that assistive intelligence really lowered the kind of everyday chore of the public servants oh fantastic so okay now i think this probably is a bit more difficult question hopefully i'm not giving you two questions they're too too easy but uh how good is taiwan cyber security i mean is it as a digital as a hacker yourself yeah we're we're sitting here means it's pretty good okay um it's battle tested so um it's very interesting because in taiwan uh the white hat uh hacker community is very active just as our civic hacker community is active uh i think last year they won the second place in the international DEF CON CTF the kind of like annual olympic level contest um this was DEF CON in the us yeah DEF CON CTF uh they won second place uh next only to the us team i think this year maybe we win but anyway so we're seeking but uh in any case the point is that the white hat hackers in taiwan is considered both a prestigious as in they're like i don't know defenders of of our island and also paid very well because we may show that for each government project uh five to seven percent of all id budget goes to cyber security alone like penetration testing third time saying purple taming and so on and in the next four years we're expanding that to five to seven percent of the total budget which is even more right so if you're a white hat hacker you get paid well you have a lot of chance to meet with the president or the minister um and also you get recognized for your work and to make sure that young people learn about all these ethical hacking things so they don't fall to the dark side which has more cookies so these people are the white hat hackers are contractors working for the government or yeah some of them decided to contract and work for the government some of them started their own company like trend micro is actually quite famous internationally i never thought of them as white hat hackers they are white hat hackers okay yeah they do they do prevention they do forensics they they even do disinformation analysis they also have a chat bot called doctrine message that can look at trending rumors on the line platform if you forward it to them or invite the bot to your chat room it does what antivirus does best which is scan each incoming message and if sees something like a scam or a you know disinformation package it just says right there that this is virus detected disinformation detected and so on so the private sector is very important in keeping the cybersecurity branding so making sure that everyday people just like they trust about antivirus company they would also learn about good information hygiene so to speak so that those scams or those disinformation packages won't have a r-value over one meaning that people wouldn't spread it to other people that it could be contact traced and that's called cybersecurity attribution uh and and hunt it down okay so trend micro i think is based in japan that there's no conflict of interest with them being in japan but doing more true well there's some investors and some developers in japan but trend micro started as a time yes yes i know that right okay um okay so there have been several serious hacking incidents this year uh from some of the reports i've read even some confidential documents were you know inside the central government were lost really yeah oh so you're you're not aware of that what you mean the presidential office yes i i thought one i think one's report i read said that what uh the personal details on uh you know taiwan citizens were were act and and uh it was long ago though it was long ago it was long ago um the news still was new and and i think it's very interesting how how long ago was that by the way i think it's around 2008 2009 okay like that okay because it's a it's a very old copy and it's probably not from a government database it could be from multiple sources the format is like very chaotic it came from various different sources as woven together and in in in any case it's not news to us so it's very interesting how the the press have kind of rediscovered uh that uh i think it's interesting because it compares i think to the presidential office which is again not office document it's more like personal notes uh from the presidential office and it's not the the carbon copy of the personal note either it's being adjusted strategically and sent to to journalists and so all this um there's no kind of single incident that uh give these results rather it's more like a kind of media operation that they want to i don't know scare Taiwanese people maybe okay okay okay so they're i'm i'm sure you're aware of these reports that said that uh a lot of even state-run companies like uh what uh john hotell com yeah so on and so forth they they were all they were also under these cyber attacks during this year i think it was prior to uh to uh president size the beginning of her second term of office so i think you are aware of those incidents i mean did they actually happen yeah well it's been going on for a very long time though um because for example the the the so-called um the household uh data that you just referred to uh the vast majority uh is from before 2004 okay and from 2005 to 2008 there's been according to our investigation people there's been 30 uh new data inserted in uh and so it's just i don't know how to put it but i think the main point is that it's been going on for a very long time this is what we call advanced persistent threats or a apt so while the majority was before 2004 uh from time to time they add just a few uh items that they somehow managed to get uh and to kind of keep refreshing this memory of uh you know tony's personal data being circulated uh dark web and things like that and so i think a lot of it though i think is just to create a a atmosphere of unease of anxiety more than anything instead of hard cyber attack i think this is more like in the mold information area okay so what is it fair to say then that taiwan's cyber security now is better than 2004 yes okay okay well that's good to know um all right because i've also heard people say that taiwan is sort of like a laboratory for these hacks coming from from china right i mean it's a fairly constant thing that that's what i mean by battle that's it yeah yeah okay so those yeah uh those there's been no decrease in those attacks right yeah there's been no decrease but again i think uh because of the white hand hacker community in taiwan they don't have to do exercises or drills right they face real things every day so that also prompts us to have a strong cyber security culture and also if you liken it to kind of personal hygiene like using soap to wash your hand and things like that uh two factor authentication and things like that uh it makes it the norm to do so and a lapse in that of course sometimes causes minor community cases but it never really evolved into community transmission like in the critical infrastructure it doesn't affect the operations like the operation technology because we design already with these in mind and most of the core infrastructure doesn't even connect to the internet okay what about some of these privately run companies though like tsmc apparently they're also they're part of critical infrastructure too okay yeah and uh they're um mis their information management um also have a lot of really good white hat hackers in i know because tm tsmc poached one white hat hacker from my office oh tsmc how long ago was that it was a year ago a year ago okay so apparently they're they're cyber security is also fairly good and they have to i mean by law because tsmc is classified as part of our critical infrastructure oh yeah i mean if i remember several years ago there was uh what some of their equipment was affected by some sort of a worm uh i believe i don't know if you're familiar with that but that that did have some impact on there i think they had to shut down yeah but i think it was contained very quickly okay yeah so it's not like we're totally invincible to attack but the idea of defense at depth is that as soon as you notify that happens first you do a notification to the core coordinated reporting system assert on the other hand they have a business resilience plan for example they would unplug the internet cables and continue to do plan b work which keeps its normal work running obey as a i guess a reduced efficiency but it's not like end of the world okay all right so how does uh is there anything that taiwan needs to do to prevent future cyber attacks well i think one of the main thing we're working on as i said is just to increase the budget if every government agency see that when they're procuring they're not adding server security as some extra item after but rather they use penetration testing as a norm when i become digital minister i set up this system called sandstorm that allows cross-departmental document sharing uh spreadsheet sharing and so on and we asked the top hackers the one that got the second place uh in the defconn cdf uh to attack the system uh is open source so it's why bought text testing for six months and they file three cvs three vulnerabilities and finally concluded okay it's safe right so we need to make this a habit and this is not just for a virtual system for example in the self-driving testing ground uh in charlotte right uh we also hosted this grand challenge to invite one hand hackers to make sure that nobody can i guess remote control the self-driving equals into killing machines or something to making sure that's that physical infrastructure is uh also safe before we allow any testing on that proofing ground oh okay i think i saw some of the i i had to kind of rub my eyes when i saw these self-driving vehicles uh in that area how how soon is that going to start it's running now or is it in the shini dedicated bus lane was that right yeah it's just it's not picking up passengers yet because i think there's two models one was nine people one was 35 people and they worked after the metro closed so it's kind of like a pseudo software defined metro and they're now training those assistive intelligence to get familiar with the road of Taipei and soon once they're reasonably familiar then people will be able to take on those buses so how soon will that be i think before end of the year it will that be a world's first probably not the world's first but in taiwan there's many world's first so there's also self-driving boats uh i think in galsheng and also um self-driving uh drones that's already everywhere and so when we do our self-driving vehicle uh testing sandbox act we did not distinguish between uh different modes it could be something gets on water and then flies or goes on the road or whatever it could be multi-mobile and all of this are now under testing and many of them require 5g to properly work because of pollution prevention vehicle to vehicle communication and so on i think by tomorrow two of the many major telecoms will announce the general 5g availability oh okay now i know this is kind of this is not on the list of questions but right i mean i see a lot of uh chinese made equipment in taiwan like a Huawei equipment zte equipment it is hopefully not in our office system is that is that a concern though i mean could could it be a weakness it's a it's a it's a debate we had uh when we occupied the parliament uh in 2014 uh in sunflower more than 20 NGOs each debated one aspect of the cross trade server and trade agreement or the cstn one of them uh debated whether we need to allow prc components in our 4g infrastructure and uh result everybody knows it by now is now right we do not allow prc components in the base stations in the basic infrastructures but also people doesn't feel that handheld devices that super phones at that time was a big threat because if you secure the core infrastructures there's very limited damage what a phone could do and that was kind of the rough consensus at a time of course later on Huawei would get into trouble with ncc because in their firmware update they insist calling taiwan you know taiwan province of china or something like that but that's another thing altogether right so our strategy is just to keep infrastructure safe uh and then in the public sector of course we do not procure prc components but in the economic sector where the damage is negligible if they're not in critical infrastructures at the moment there's no i'll write that okay all right and so then what i think you explained already quite a bit about taiwan's coder culture which is kind of surprised to me because i've i've always kind of perceived of taiwan as more sort of a hardware place i know our best software engineers gets conscripted into working for hardware fans yeah so so what what is the coder culture like here in taiwan yeah i think in the recent years there's been a lot of change i think assistive intelligence or ai really play a large part that's when the sme suddenly see that they can do a digital transformation and instead of kind of saving money amortized somewhere down the line they can just save money immediately by automating a lot of their chores on qa work automation work and things like that with very little programming required it's basically just a assistive intelligence apprentice observing their senior staff working and so for that the digital transformation there's a lot of people kind of freed up from this hardware industry now working with the miss me's to do digital transformation even for example some internationally known people like ezen du the person who was in charge of the cortana ai in the microsoft ecosystem moved back to taiwan to start the alabs to explore human computer interaction medical uses a lot of the pandemic counter pandemic uses of ai that was pioneered by the alab the gold card visa also helped i think the founder one of the founders of youtube is also now back to taiwan using gold card and so on so we're seeing a influx of pure software people working with the hardware ecosystem to work on what we call sensory fusion projects that requires for example in the southern vehicle you need the optics the acoustics the lidar whatever to work very closely together and that often requires computation at the edge that is to say on the vehicle instead of in the cloud because that would be too too late and tsmc of course can do whatever chip you design for that and so there's a very good integrated supply chain not only the peripherals the optics the chips and so on but also people specializing in interaction design that's your design and so on all of these people are now going back to taiwan sometimes accidentally because they were just here for a new year and then they find there's nowhere as safe as taiwan so they say so that was sort of an indirect impact of the corona virus definitely i mean a lot of people who kind of accidentally you know just go back to visit their parents and then wait where am i going i'm not going anywhere and then started to to really think about how could they can contribute to taiwan well that's fantastic i i really love to meet some of these people if you could help introduce me to them of course yeah because i think that's one i mean okay i've covered the hardware industry for you know so many years and so i've always had this perception of you know this is a very you know manufacturing oriented sort of industry here right but so it's interesting to hear that you know we now have this sort of coder culture that is yes you can talk to a recent winner of co-hack right i talked about lockboard where you keep your word about in the phone and there's someone another team called autonomy that does that but on a community scale community level and the the person leading that ever is called shan most puts and he runs bitmark in taiwan but i think he's american uh and he and his co-founders and their friends are now trapped in the bubble uh but they said it's a good book to be trapped so maybe i can introduce you to shan you can have a chat yeah that would be great that would be great i would love that uh so yeah so yeah you've introduced some of these people so what about the lgbt scene in taiwan we're going to have a find physically i think the only one in the world right yeah right i read that so that what is that going to be so um it's a series of events right the municipal governments uh the various different NGOs and so on they have a series of um events i think there's um wow a lot actually they they start today uh and and continues for quite some time and um a lot of so um yeah the the news i was just reading the news it says a nearly 500 other events globally have been cancelled uh and so a lot of energy has been pouring in uh into the the the pride uh so there's of course the global pride online uh but there's also um the according to the taiwan gay sports association um the the global pride family celebration is on sunday which was yesterday uh and then uh continued with a lot of live streaming extra the again sat there was not fine okay so how has this opening to the lgbt community here really changed society in taiwan well uh in two ways uh one i think uh people after the two referendum one constitutional ruling uh really see that our very innovative msa uh legalizing the bylaws but not the in-laws or a mandarin jiehwen bujie in uh it is very creative because for taiwanese people who married before 2007 uh it could be by social ceremony meaning that it's a matter between two families but after 2008 it's by registration only which means it's between two individuals and this is called when and that is called in right and so when we did the legalization a year or so ago um we legalized a hyperlinked act that basically says for uh you know home same-sex marriage uh they hyperlinked to every part of the civil code that says the when the rise in beauty is of individuals but it doesn't link to any part of the civil code that talks about families so their farm families are wet okay their individuals wet okay and so this is very interesting because this kind of is something both generations can live with it doesn't disrupt the the um i don't know eight different pronouns um that we use for outside uncles not really pronoun proper nouns that we use for outside uncles but it does protect the same rights and beauties of the the newlyweds uh and so i think this really has a spirit in taiwan uh after the legalization they had both sides feel oh the things that we cherish which is marriage itself uh is being taken care of the family to family value is preserved the individual wants is also being protected and so um i think the approval rate of same-sex marriage grew by like 10 percent between the legalization and now proving that this is not a kind of majority over minority thing but rather is something that we can all live with that's the first and the second is that it creates a uh at least in east asia a really good uh precedence for other jurisdictions look at you just as in in south korea they said oh taiwan published a mask pharmacy map every 30 second why cannot our government do that and they managed to convince their government to do exactly that in um tailand in japan and across the whole of asia we have activists now telling us that this legalizing the bylaw and not in laws may just be the ticket uh and so the power model is spreading so that's also useful internationally that also helps to build recognition of taiwan yes of course right right um yeah this is kind of a personal thing but i've always felt like inclusiveness is is kind of a it's something that presidents high pushed when she first became president you know she had this famous quote in her organization spanish saying that you know before democracy was showdown between opposing values but from now on democracy must become conversation between diverse values and and she's really good at making sure that we take all the signs when designing uh these major policy reforms right right yeah okay um i don't know how we're doing on time here i i know you're you're kind of busy 15 more minutes okay um so are you working with the pro i know you were involved during the sunflower movement with the people in hong kong but are you are you still working with these protesters in hong kong now many of them actually visited me uh either physically or digitally in the past few months um due to um generally in all circumstances uh and many of them are very delighted when they see a week or so ago that our government under president saying west direction have this dedicated office and hotline for protection of hong kong people if they want to seek asylum or they want to seek a platform which to speak to international media and things like that we're happy to help taiwan is here to help so that that's the main form of support that you're providing to these people in hong kong well also hosting also a freedom foreign hosting the reporter without orders making sure that their stories are told truthfully uh and and journalists and in taiwan can report however they want without uh worrying they would be invited out yeah yeah so is there any other way that the government here is supporting the be water movement in in hong kong well i think be water starts from hong kong i mean say it's a li xia long thing right it's a risky thing right uh but it's it's we see it everywhere in the world now i think the people in brasilona quotes be water uh and pretty much everybody in the world now who have heard of how this leaderless movement work uh could see that it's a new stage of uh protests i know extinction rebellion also use some of those uh tactics uh and uh even alternative parties like alternate events uh in danmark and so on there they're all i would say imitate i would say they're learning from the be water ethos uh and basically become a hashtag and once a movement become a hashtag it's leaderless right you can't confiscate a hashtag or or imprison the hashtag because it's just an idea um i don't understand how that works though i mean i think it's a brilliant idea uh but how do you have a leaderless movement right well well hashtag me too is a great example uh if you see hashtag me too um like i i for one cannot be called who first used that hashtag but i know what that means uh and hashtag black life matters now uh have a very similar structure i mean there's ostensibly leaders but there's like just in hong kong there are leaders there are people who make uh music like make glory be to hong kong so but they do so by co-creation they do so uh allowing uh remixes they relinquish most of the copyright anyway uh and so that each generation uh and i mean generation a very fast iteration since i don't mean 20 years maybe 20 seconds uh after they publish it um internet platforms uh people start to remix and make more potent memes uh on top of those hashtags and that's how we see those very trending hashtags being created you can see the same involving taiwan with the milk tea alliance uh hashtag you can see it in the viva taiwan hashtag uh there's a lot of hashtag structure of that okay but for example if you if you want to organize a protest or something like that how yeah you have a good hashtag okay yeah okay okay so then everybody organizes under underneath that that's right yeah okay yeah my main hashtag as you can see is called taiwan can help okay okay so okay then what what are your personal aspirations what what are you what do you see yourself doing maybe five years from now 10 years from now exactly as as now okay building common values out of different positions and also when something really needs uh to be done and nobody seems to be doing it well i still have some programming chops i guess i can do that myself as a civic pattern um i changed for example the translation uh one word really a typo uh in the japan stop covid dashboard for the tokyo metropolis uh and that was me as a github contributor not me as a digital minister all right and uh code for japan look kind of their equivalent to cup zero um how does the kisang their their leader tweeted it and the city councilor tweeted it and then the mayor of tokyo tweeted it as if this is somehow you know trick one diplomacy but this is really digital or track zero diplomacy so i still do that from time to time kind of as a hobby but most of the time i spend my time listening to different stakeholders and try to build common value out of different positions okay so does that mean you you i mean you're working in the private sector or the public sector in the future or maybe both no obviously both right i work primarily in the social sector the people right right that the people who voluntarily see injustices in the world and try to come up with innovations that makes it that's bad or a lot better but the economic sector of course can amplify these like google supported the mask map the public sector again can support the necessary open data and so on but it's for first and foremost social sector okay right so then what what are your aspirations for taiwan so the jade mountain savia the tip of taiwan the peak grows by two or three centimeters every year toward the sky and that is because the tectonic plates and and i think this is very symbolic or not at all symbolic if you go to the taroko gorge you get to see that in action so the two plates that bump into each other all the time both creates earthquakes forcing us to be resilient and force us to look at things from a higher vantage point and i think this is what i call transculturalism which is be in taiwan with more than 20 national languages including the sign language which has become very popular thanks to them daily press conferences they all enjoy equal sign in shaping the future of taiwan which is growing upward toward this time okay so then that's very abstract though i think right but but that's that's what liberal democracy is all about it is being open to possible futures this is not a top down like we do a 10-year plan right this is what whatever people think of today we translate that into national scale innovation tomorrow or next year yeah do do you ever i mean a lot of the people i've spoken to of course talk about independence for taiwan people say well it already is independent yeah it's not it's not it's not really something we need to since the neolithic age right i heard that comment from you before that was that was brilliant geological okay so there's no point really in in overemphasizing uh you know taiwan becoming uh well i think internationally it's very important that people i think after the marriage equality after milk tea after now the taiwan model uh less and less people confused as with taiwan not not not that i have anything against taiwan i've been in taiwan many times and they also have milk tea there and also bubble tea but in any case the point is that um taiwan as a a brand internationally still have a lot of room to develop there's many people who hear taiwan and only think of tsmc not that tmc is is is not our what our pride but we have much more to offer in liberal democracy in our countering the infodemic without takedown countering pandemic without lockdown all sort of different contributions taiwan can help so it's not just hardware manufacturing so i think a lot of international branding and image is what we can work on and that for me is even more important than any sort of de jure independence and even if you are working for de jure independence that's kind of a requirement for de jure independence because i would recognize you know mutually uh from the international community and taiwan's contributions right yeah i i think recognition is you know it's an important point really but how to how to achieve greater recognition i think that's it's not so easy i mean you you mentioned taiwan being confused with taiwan well i had someone just a few days ago make that mistake yeah um so i mean how does taiwan actually achieve greater recognition yeah i think it's twofold first is as in like taiwan can help that us which is not even a government website it's a crowdfunded website uh they basically collect everything they can about the taiwan model to counter the pandemic and offering kind of epicenter to epicenter working with youtubers and so on to get the taiwan model out especially the critical part about how taiwan nowadays do make 12 million masks per day and we can export easily two million masks per day an automated factory anywhere in the world if you want that and so that's part of the message that the civil society is offering the world basically if you're still struggling with the coronavirus there's at least some parts in taiwan model that we can help and we're willing to help uh in fact we have a list of people in taiwan can help that us uh that's dedicated to their uncollected mask quota for international humanitarian aid and and they are now in the numbers of almost 700 thousand now which uh together donated more than uh the quota of five million and the fun thing is that you can see it um exactly who so so half of the people decide to remain anonymous but half of the people decide to show your name so if you type in my name you can see exactly how many masks did i dedicate uh which is 36 but it's not really 36 it's just six for me but other people who share part of my name dedicated uh their their masks uh quota so so this is the first branch this is civil society social sector youtuber and so on getting the story out getting the message out and the second which is more traditional like official track for example for the international democracy forum dr zangwin our president just gave a speech there virtually before the wha we hosted our own kind of pre wha mini electoral meeting with 14 jurisdictions and through the global cooperation training framework with japan and us and other host countries we do focused workshops on evodemic and things like that and so uh circular economy and so on so for all these mini laterals um taiwan gets um a lot of stage to to offer concrete help instead of focusing our energy solely on nearly 200 countries big multi lateral uh where taiwan traditionally have very little room to navigate uh starting this year we're focusing more on mini laterals and multi stakeholder forums okay one person i interviewed who he he's doing video production and he's he's produced videos for discovery tv national geographic and a lot of them introducing taiwanese cuisine that sort of thing yeah i i thought that he had a very interesting comment about you know winning more recognition for taiwan he said that he feels that it's it's not really important to have a lot of friends it's more important to have just a few very good friends well i guess that depends on whether you're extrovert or introvert okay if you're introvert you prefer a few very good friends okay because meeting with a lot of people drinks you down but if you're extrovert then the larger the party the better okay and and so i think both are important um the general population from like a random country a random um human being if they associate taiwan with something nice something warm um something for example we dedicate the mask or we send our medical supplies we help the agriculture there within a field is to remember how we refine their rise in productions and so on uh of course that's generally good but i agree that it's also important to have a few very good close allies that share the common values and work on common projects together well it certainly helps when uh the the white house holds a press conference and the masks they're wearing say made in taiwan right right here right so it's kind of an assurance on the quality okay i i think i just have one more question which was not on the list but i just read yesterday that uh that taiwan is going to establish a digital ministry is that correct that's correct okay or will you be the the the minister of that digital i will help in getting the plan out okay but uh because uh this is already ready the budget session so which means that even if it passes this upcoming session i don't mean the very eventful emergency session right now i mean the regular session after what the new ministry would not run because it wouldn't have a budget for for next year so the earliest it could run is actually the year after the next okay right and so for the next year and a half uh will have a lot of contributions from legislators also how the digital ministry should work because although it's a presidential promise it's a campaign promise from veteran signwin it's also something pretty much all the parties feel as necessary to do so they'll probably have a lot more inputs into the the act so from the administration of course i can't say uh you know what it will look like because it has not passed even the first reading in the legislation and once it does pass hopefully in the next regular session then we can talk more about how to allocate the budget how to make sure the personnel's work and things like that but that will take place next year okay okay well i think my time's up so thank you so much for your time really good questions well thank you