 Sure. OK. So please, yeah, give us your name and leave it on how you ended up in this seat today. I'm Oji Tong, Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation. 10 years ago, I was part of G0, the org of ZERO, a civic tech movement that take all the government websites and imagine new ways to do it, to fork the government. So I guess nowadays, for the past six years, we're now merging back into the government. And where does it come from the activism that you did? How did you become interested or involved in digital movements and activism? Yeah. When I was a child, my parents first worked in journalism as investigative journalists. And I always think that if people see that there are better alternatives that are available for people to experience, then it inspires people to take action. And so when, for example, the parliament here in Taiwan was occupied peacefully in March 2014, my work along with other people in the G0 initiative is exactly to show people that it is possible to occupy in a way that's not just nonviolent but also constructive, that half a million people on the street and many more online can imagine a better future and have a wide deliberation with everyone, either on the street or online. And what happened during this particular movement? First, can you tell us where you were and how you? It was the first time for a lot of people, and especially in your generation, that people would take the streets and protest in such a way. How did that make you feel? You and the people around you? And some kind of personal feeling about that movement? Yeah. I feel very much curious how much of this free software, open source ethics that I've been advocating and living, really, since the mid-90s could work at scale. Because on, say, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, or other internet communities, of course, people can be open to strangers, because you cannot really punch anyone across the screen, right? So there are certain ways to do constructive co-creation in a way that doesn't harm everyone and it will come strangers. But it is quite different with half a million people on the street. There is this real danger of people believing in conspiracy theories or rumors that escalates to violence, as we have seen other occupiers around the world. Prior to 2014, I was very interested in Manuel Castell's theories and observations of occupying movements around the world. I also helped translating part of his book about this phenomena. So I was quite aware both of the dangers. There's a certain trepidation of the escalation to violence. But also I feel curious that what if the nonviolent communication, the open space technology, the dynamic facilitation methods that we learned from our open source and free software communities can be applied on the street. It's good to sound, but just sometimes it's making me a little bit noisy. Really? Yeah, a little bit. So it's still doing that. If you want some more tape, we stick it again. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Why not? I think just make it thicker, like more room between the mic and the clothes. OK, so I'm going to put this. Yes, bringing it down. This much? Yes, a little more tape. OK, yes, that's good, thank you. Does this show, like, is it OK? It shows a little bit. It shows a little bit? It shows a little bit. We do what he said, we are going to do what Manuel. Yes, we don't do what Manuel said. But it doesn't ruffle any much, right? No, it doesn't ruffle. Just I don't picture it staying in fact. That's what you're saying. OK, if you just spread it out. Yeah, I think that it's good that I wore black, because otherwise it wouldn't work. And can you explain to our audience that it's not so familiar with the sunflower movement? What was the justification for half a million people in the street? Certainly. So back in March 2014, the parliament at sign was trying to rush through a trade deal with Beijing. And at the time, it was said that constitutionally, it's not an international treaty. And so it doesn't go through the same process as would, for example, in signing something with France or New Zealand. But because of that, people were very worried that the parliamentarians were not giving the public a chance to deliberate substantially, and instead just rushes through as a package. So the rallying cry was really that MPs were on strike of sorts, because they refused to deliberate substantially. And so the students, mostly at their grad level, are occupying the parliament, taking the MP's place, doing what MPs should have been doing, which is deliberating everything piece by piece. And so they were supported by more than 20 NGOs around the occupied parliament streets, each deliberating on a single aspect of the CSSTA, the trade deal with Beijing. And were you involved as, at the moment, what was your implication? Yeah, so at the time, during the sunflower movement, there were three kind of neutrals. One is the pro bono lawyers there to protect the due process. There is also the clinicians and nurses, doctors, there to protect everyone's health. And we're kind of the communication crew to make sure that even deep within the occupied parliament, where there's no fiber optic lines and so on, there's still broadband for everyone so that people on the street can make sure that the occupiers are doing peaceful things and they are not threatened by the police. Were you yourself at the legislative union at that particular moment? So I was there in the legislative union for a few hours, because I brought more than 300 meters of ethernet cables, wiring the occupied legislative union so that regardless of the live streaming platforms connectivity, we can directly play what's really happening within the occupied parliament to the people on the street, allowing for direct conversations. And this is the beginning of the idea of humor over rumor, because if you can enjoy a co-presence, being together, even though that actually there's walls right in the legislature, but through live streaming, people can feel that they are there and they can effect real change through telepresence. And that's made sure that people pay sufficient attention so that escalation to violence or rumors or conspiracy theories do not have a way to travel. So that was our contribution as the Gulf Zero community in the cable and power and radio, communications for the occupiers. And was it, would you say that it was the base of the foundation of, when you talk about radical transparency, was it the foundation of this principle of radical transparency? As for radical transparency, rough consensus, running code and so on, these are the foundation of the internet. The internet society, the community that formed the internet, derives their legitimacy, their right to exist by being radically transparent. Anyone with an email account since the very beginning of the internet can participate in the rulemaking or the request for comments process for the internet. And the same ethos has been carried into the free software community, the open source community, open access community, and so on. So in a sense, radical transparency around the legislature which was occupied in 2014 was just a new manifestation of the same idea that if you are radically transparent to everyone, then strangers would behave in a pro-social way. They would not behave in an anti-social way if everybody can see what's going on. And would you say, to what extent do you think that the sunflower movement embodied a turning point in the Taiwanese society and maybe the way that things are governed here? I think the sunflower movement really changed how young people look at politics. Back in 2014, before the sunflower movement, if you ask a random young person on the street, they will say they don't care about politics. The trust level to the administration was really low, but people do not want to take direct action either. So the point here is that the sunflower movement made it possible for people to see, like through this collective peak experience, people of very different ideas, those 20 NGOs actually belong to like 20 different ideological camps, can actually work together, affect real change and derive innovations that are based on those common consensus that people agreed on the street, facing the Beijing trade deal request and so on. So the same principle has later on then been applied to many, many other parts of our political processes, leading, for example, to marriage equality and many other social breakthroughs that was formed on the backbone of this newfound willingness for young people to re-engage into political action. And would you say that yourself, you could be also the embodiment of the sunflower movement, the fact that your position has been created in this government? What would you, what can you say about this? Right after the sunflower movement, it was very clear in the mayor election that came later that year that every mayor candidate, regardless of their party affiliation, has to support open government, radical transparency, city participation because the mayors that didn't support these occupied ethos simply lost their election. And the mayors that do, regardless of their parties, sometimes didn't prepare in invoicing speech but they got elected anyway. So the wind of politics has changed. And so the cabinet reshuffled around the end of the year and a new cabinet said very explicitly that we want crowdsourcing, open data, this whole civic participation thing to be the national strategy going forward. And so starting there, there become a kind of national cabinet level dedicated space for civic participation and for a good reason because people generally understood that if there's no online forum for everyone to participate and talk and make sure that they can effect real change, then people are probably going back to Occupy anyway. So it is actually a safer space compared to the parliament for direct action and deliberation. And so at that time, they looked at the facilitators, the civic technologists that supported Occupy and invited us in as reverse mentors to the cabinet. So I was also here at this very office but not as a minister as a young reverse mentor of the ministry back then, Jacqueline Tsai. And what kind of knowledge did you bring from your own personal experience? Is it, I mean, it's very unusual for a government to have someone with your own background in within the cabinet. So what kind of expertise did you bring? And if you can also explain a little bit what you've been trying to promote throughout, the fact that you will probably work with different ministers or ministries and different fields, basically. Yeah, I see what you mean. So at the moment, I'm a minister with a portfolio or at-large minister. There is always eight or nine at-large ministers in the cabinet, in addition to the 32, 33 vertical ministers with their own ministries. And so this cross-ministerial minister, I think works very well, especially for emerging topics such as digital or open governments or youth engagement because at-large minister can coordinate not just inter-agency or cross-ministerial meetings, but also with the private sector, with the social sector and so on. So we're like the interfaces to the public. And now I'm not the first minister at-large working with such themes. It's actually kind of a norm here in Taiwan. Like before me, as I mentioned, Jacqueline Tsai, previously at IBM, Asia, before her, Simon Zhang, previously at Google, Asia, and so on. So there's kind of always a minister at-large or two that surfaces interface with the digital crowd. And to finish with the sunflower movement, do you think that in a way, I mean, it brought change to the Taiwanese society and it certainly brought President Tsai's power two years later? What do you say to people who also say that the rise of tensions with China also come from that point that maybe people in Beijing had the feeling that Taiwan was steering away from their, maybe I can say, authority, and I'm not sure if that's the correct word to use. The sphere of influence. The sphere of influence is exactly what I was looking for. So what do you respond to these positions? The sunflower movement was centered on the idea that any trade deal with Beijing must be treated as an international process, not a domestic process. Of course, we understand this position is not exactly the same as the Beijing position vis-a-vis Taiwan, so that does create tension. But if you ask the 20 NGOs, they focus on very practical matters sometimes. For example, one particular side of the occupied parliament talks about the emerging threat that Beijing, so-called private sector has on our 4G infrastructure back then, because at the time we're switching to 4G LTE and a lot of the Beijing jurisdictions vendors are really entering the market with a very, very low price. And so people were saying, oh, this is just a market function and we should just evaluate on cost and so on. On the other hand, the occupiers pointed out that at any given time in the Beijing regime, there's no such thing as a pure private sector. If their state forces them to install backdoors or install charging horses and so on, then maybe on the next release, the next patch release, then there will be backdoor introduced and we'll have to spend a lot of time, a lot of energy to ensure that each and every upgrade of the firmware, of the equipment and so on are free of such state interferences and that highlighted a fundamental difference between the liberal democratic countries and authoritarian countries. In that, for example, if we use Nokia or use other infrastructures from other democratic countries, there's far less chance for the state to meddle in this way because their journalists will probably uncover that even before we do, right? And so the systemic risk evaluation principle was introduced back then during the Occupy and so I would say that these methods are quite practical. They're not ideological, like unification or independence things, but rather just the fact that it is a authoritarian and opaque regime creates market conditions that are not fair and people want to make sure that everyone here in Taiwan have a whole of society conversation about these realizations, these understandings. I'd like to move on to non-zero and so after. Sure, after a short break, yes. I think you want to have a... No, no, it's fine, but I want to check with you. So in your last question, you actually want me to say something geopolitical, I mean, instead of just add sunflower. I mean, I was going to ask again, but more in the second part, the fact that for me, God's zero, I mean, I want to ask a little bit more about this culture of a hacktivism and the fact that you come from that particular world and because it's going to help me transition to what you feel the Taiwanese model actually is and then I was curious to ask you a few questions about how do you see this model in comparison to the Chinese model in the way? The fact that here everything is very transparent and it seems that new technologies are used to that effect, but at the same time, it creates... The more this is emphasized, the more it creates a gap with what's happening across the street in the way. Yeah, but I want to somewhat challenge that frame because back in 2014 or 2010, the PRC region also wasn't as opaque as it is now. There was some sort of journalism back then, right? But nowadays, I'm not sure how much journalism is left. So in a sense, they're also steering away, like moving very quickly to the opposite direction. I want to stress that because I'll probably be talking about how Taiwan plays the first in Asia, the eighth in the world on the scale of democracy, according to the economist, but I don't want to portray this image that we accelerated so much on the democracy. The real fact is that during the two years of the pandemic, everybody backslided and just by remaining equally democratic, we became number one. And so the same applies to the PRC. It looks like the gap is very wide now, but maybe it's not that much because we progress a lot. Maybe it's because they backslided quite a bit, right? That that was the frame I was trying to introduce. Okay, interesting. I think it's an interesting position. So maybe just start with the Taiwanese model and the fact that it, as you were saying, plays a little bit this role of being the champion of democracy. And how would you define the Taiwanese model today and what are the core values that you feel are representing this particular model and how have you seen this model sort of come of age? Okay, I think the Taiwan model has always been about collaborating across diversity. It's about democracy, not just as voting every four years or two years, but rather continuously. So that everybody feel that democracy is an ongoing process. It's like a social technology that everybody can improve just like any other sort of technology that we practice and it goes better with time. So it's about looking at democracy as a living, organic thing that everybody regardless of their ideas or their cultures and so on can equally contribute. So I think that's the Taiwan model. And that's what enabled us to, for example, counter the disinformation crisis without administrative takedowns. It's what allowed us to counter the pandemic without a single day of lockdowns in the past two and a half years and so on. And so all this I think proved that diversity really is a strength and not necessarily the kind of polarization and escalation violence that seems to occupy many people's mind in the West nowadays that if they think about diversity or diversity on social media, people think automatically about escalation, about violence and so on. But as our experience in Occupy and encountering pandemic and infodemic shown, actually there is a pro-social way to go about these things. And you just mentioned the two years of pandemic here in Taiwan, basically all over the world. But the fact that the way that it was handled here in Taiwan also helped put Taiwan on the map. So that's of course the management from the health ministry. But what can you tell us about the way that was handled from your point of view? The fact that you're talking about transparency and the fact that open systems of an open source. So what was so specific in the way that Taiwan handled the COVID pandemic starting in 2020? I think the talent model when applied to counter pandemic is based on the fact that we make the state transparent to the people, not the other way around. And the state trusted people, not asking for trust. So this is very empowering, basically saying that we trust the people closest to the field, closest to the pain, understand things better than we do. So for example, we have a toll free number 1922 that anyone can call and meet with someone listening with empathy. And anyone can suggest directly through the toll free number, whatever new ideas they have on countering pandemic. There's a real discussion going on on the PTT, which is a civil society foreign free of advertisers or shareholders that alerted the health ministry on the first day of 2020. So that we start health inspections before pretty much everyone else and so on. So this is the participation from everyone instead of people obeying in a top down lockdown, shut down kind of way. It is people understanding basic epidemiological facts and then acting on however they feel correct or comfortable and relying on the social norm to innovate as the virus mutates. And how was that put in place? You just mentioned the toll free phone number. Can you give us other examples? I know that Taiwan was one of the first countries to think about the QR codes to be unique. So for example, how do you meet that with privacy concerns? Can you explain a little bit how this whole platform was based on transparency? And I know that even people in France were at the beginning a little bit wary of where that might go because of privacy issues. So can you explain a little bit how Taiwan dealt with that? So I mentioned the toll free number 1922. In April 2020, for example, a young boy called 1922 saying, you're rationing out masks, which is great. All I got was pink, which is not great. None of the boys in my class wear pink. I don't want to wear pink to school. Give me some blue masks. The very next day, on the daily 2 p.m. press conference, all the medical officers wore pink. And the minister, Chen Shijun, even said, oh, Pink Panther is my childhood hero. So suddenly, the boy became the most hip boy in the class, for only he has the color that the hero's wear. And the hero's hero, I guess, wear. And all the fashion brands turn pink for a few weeks. So this is what I mean by nor building, by making it a meme that a mask is there for you to express yourself, not to shut yourself up. It changes the meaning of mask wearing. And so people would wear a mask because they like fashionable rainbow or whatever leopard colors and textures and so on, which very quickly made it a norm to wear a mask all the time. And that helped us to overcome the first few variants in the coronavirus. Now the same goes for the mask rationing. The Gov Zero community built a website, actually a hundred or so websites built by various other communities that people can just check with their phone and see nearby availability of medical grade masks so people would not queue in vain. And later on, this has been expanded so that people can locate rapid testing kits or book for vaccination in a very easy way. But these are not government inventions. These are civic technologies built by people who care about privacy, about the dignity, about the personal rise on the digital realms and so on. And they are open source so that by trusting the citizen scientists, the civic tech people to build essential counter pandemic infrastructure, we make sure that we trust the people so more people trust back, I guess. Compare that if we just look at contact tracing. Many jurisdictions choose to work with Apple or Google to roll out their first wave of exposure notification. Or some other states roll their own technology with in-house developers or contractors that are not from the open source community. And the problem is that both are kind of centralizing decision-making power. All those parameters, all those algorithms are written in a way that's kind of opaque, that people cannot directly modify, right? So the point here in Taiwan is that our contact tracing system, the 192 to SMS system, was not created by the government. It was again created by Gulf Zero people. And the Gulf Zero people make sure that, for example, when you're scanning a QR code on a local venue, say a convenience store, the convenience store only provides this 15 random digit on the QR code, but also printed so you can also manually text it with a flip phone. But a venue never learns anything about you, not your phone number, not anything. And you text to 192 to, which is just a shorthand code for your telecom to remember those 15 digit random codes for 28 days, for four weeks. Again, the telecom provider doesn't give it to any venue owner. So the telecom provider doesn't know what those 15 digit means. So this is federated multiparty oblivious storage, which is a jargon that says all the participating parties doesn't have the whole picture. It is only the contact tracers when they have a local outbreak. They can go to the venue, look at the venue code and then send exposure notification to people who have been to that venue in the past 28 days. But those contact tracers must leave a record so that people can do a reverse lookup and see exactly who in which municipality have looked at my check-ins and why. And all of this must be deleted after four weeks. And so by using privacy enhancing technologies, we ensure that only contact tracers doing their work fully recorded can access those records. And even when, for example, the police officers investigating serious crimes, one of them tried to file a search warrant to get the mapping table between the 15 digit and the venue at the venue side. It was turned down by a judge. And the judge went whistleblowing, writing a public opinion piece, saying that, well, the communication wiretapping act works on SMS, but they must be retained for six months. But this contact tracing must be deleted after four weeks. Obviously, although they're both SMS, they're not the same thing. So the police officers must not treat these contact tracing SMS as communication because it's not communicating with anyone. So the CECC, the Central Deputy Command Center, immediately started a consultation and ruled quite quickly that indeed none of this information can be shared with law enforcement. But that was because Gavzero designed the 192 SMS system with each and every SMS have a text as part of QR code that says this must be used for pandemic control only. So already more than two million venues have printed that text to their front door. And so it very quickly established a social norm that is simply wrong for the criminal investigation to use this because it's an implicit social contract. Now, most of the jurisdictions here in Indo-Pacific across Taiwan, even when they build something that is not Apple and Google expression notifications, they often, after some internal debate, share with criminal investigators if it's really serious crime, but because that's state government technology. But here, because it's civic technology, a very strong norm of privacy-preserving ethos is already established by the time that it just received a search warrant. I'd like to use the last comments on the COVID management, on COVID management, to move on to the threats that are targeting Taiwan today. So it seems that while everything what you were just saying before was implemented here, at the same time Taiwan became the target of, for example, very harsh disinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, and mostly from its neighbor. What can you tell us about this? Do you think there's a cause to consequence type of relationship between the fact that Taiwan handled it that way and it does became the target of China or like campaigns, cyber threats? According to VDM Project, Taiwan is the top when it comes to the, on the receiving end of this information manipulation from overseas. And we see that have two reasons. One is that I think in Taiwan, we very much cherish the freedom of speech, just as we do not impose lockdowns during the pandemic. We do not do administrative takedowns. And so whereas in other more authoritarian jurisdictions, the state can just arbitrarily take things down. In Taiwan, we almost never do that. And so because that is the case, I think it allowed the disinformation and information manipulation actors to find more audience and more channels to do their attack. But the second thing though, is that Taiwan also has one of the most vibrant civic tech communities in the world. So instead of shutting things down, saying that the conspiracy theories, the attacks are getting out of hand, we actually see it as an opportunity to make sure that everybody learns about digital competence, media competence, instead of just literacy. Because literacy is when you're at a receiving end. But competence is when you are a producer of fact checks, a producer of, for example, live streaming, the counting of the ballots at the mayoral or presidential election, which is a favorite pastime for many YouTubers, regardless of their party affiliation, or for young people in middle school, or even primary school, to fact check the three presidential candidates in their debits and platforms if they found that someone says something like really wrong, maybe their contribution will appear on national level broadcast, right? So we see all sorts of different kind of mimetic threats as materials to make sure that people can work with each other to make sure that journalism isn't just a profession, but actually like public health, it's something that people can understand together and make sense together. And so that we can talk about, for example, the latest virus variants, Omicron and so on, but we can also talk about, like what's the trending disinformation of the day and make fun of it or with it, and which is what we call humor over rumor. And I believe that just like countering the pandemic without lockdowns, this empowering approach that takes all the citizenry and make sure that people can participate in countering the pandemic or the infodemic with their own contributions, at the end of the day, it builds more antibodies of the mind so that we become more resilient to the new variants of information manipulation. We had the chance to film last week a couple of teachers that are learning how to react when they see disinformation campaigns, having an influence over their own students. So we learned a lot about how this can be done. You were talking about humor over rumor. When it comes to cyber threats, cyber attacks, given your own background, how prepared is Taiwan according to you? How strong is the digital community? And here I'm more looking for your take on the fact that a lot of the people that are sort of guarding, safeguarding Taiwan are actually civilians that are very much involved in this community. Yeah, just as there are civic hackers working in Gov Zero and related communities to safeguard Taiwan during the pandemic and infodemic, so are the White Hat hackers communities, the cybersecurity researchers for good in Taiwan working in a civilian arena in a very, let me do this again, because these two sort of hackers aren't really comfortable. Okay, right, okay. Just as there are civic technologists like the Gov Zero people safeguarding against the pandemic and infodemic, there are also another sort of technologists, cybersecurity researchers, so-called White Hat hackers in Taiwan. The HITCon community and many other communities consistently placed at the very top of international cybersecurity contests competitions. For example, the DEF CON CTF and so on were consistently at the top ranks. And so with a very high technological excellence, it takes just a few ways to engage with those civic technologists in the Gov Zero and the HITCon people in the White Hat community to together look at both the service design and the resilience of our new digital services from the government. So consistently, we ask people to do penetration testing to try out our new services before they are actually rolled out and they do find new vulnerabilities before it actually gets to production to be met by real demands. We have defense in depth so that when some websites and so on may be subject to cyber attack, they cannot actually cross over to critical infrastructure or to the operational technologies. We also have this idea of joint defense. So if people in the private sector, for example, TSMC or other manufacturing and other industries face some sort of cyber attacks, there's a reliable intelligence sharing mechanism so that we can defend those incoming threats in a public-private partnership. So I would say that we're quite ready to build the next level of resilience that involve not just the private sector and public sector actors, but also, as I mentioned, the civic sector, the people who feel that they have real contributions to make to make sure that our cyber security infrastructure is ever more secure than before by well-playing the red team and letting us know our vulnerabilities before the black has to. Maybe a few last words on the Taiwan identity. I'm really curious about what it means to you. I have the feeling that when I started researching, there's such a thing as a Taiwanese identity, but it depends where you stand and people can find it differently. And I also have the feeling that there's more and more an affirmation of this identity. In other words, Taiwan is getting a more international platform, international profile. So people are wondering what actually makes Taiwan what it is and the Taiwanese what they are. What is your understanding of this and how have you seen an evolution of this perception of feeling Taiwanese? Mm-hmm. Taiwan is caught between the Eurasian Plate on one side and the Philippine Sea Plate on the other. The two plates bump into each other all the time. If you're here in Taiwan for a few months, chances are you've experienced an earthquake. It just happens very regularly. But all these earthquakes push the tip of Taiwan, the Saviara or the Jade Mountain, Yusheng, Skyward, so that once we have the resilience in our buildings, infrastructures, and so on, we cannot predict when the next earthquake will hit, but we're quite sure that we will not just survive or thrive despite or maybe because of the earthquake that makes sure that all the different sectors in Taiwan are here to help one another out in case of disasters. So the Jade Mountain representing kind of the pinnacle of plurality, collaboration across diversity grows a couple centimeters every year because of this bumping into each other. So I think for me, the Taiwanese identity is formed in a transcultural way. So the constant bumping into each other, both ideological and geological, make sure that whichever culture, whichever ideology you hold in Taiwan, you probably have to work in a pro-social manner with every other religion or faith or culture or ideology in a way that, again, moves Skyward toward common rough consensus and the common innovations delivered based on those rough consensus. So whereas many Western established democracies see, for example, privacy and human rights and public health as a zero-sum thing that you have to put a dial somewhere, during the pandemic we say, no, why not take both? We can make contact tracing work without sacrificing any privacy. We can make sure that our value goes down even without any top-down or lockdown actions. And so to me, the Taiwanese identity is disbelief that whatever the incoming threats, the incoming challenge, emergency disasters and so on, the civic capacity is here so that everyone, regardless of whether they're in private, public or social sectors, can contribute together into innovating without leaving any sector behind. And when you say that in the end, richness comes from diversity or strength comes from diversity and it comes from the bumping of communities bumping into each other and reaching themselves as they go, I'm curious about one particular aspect. Before, it seems that, or, the people that I've talked to and know a lot about the history of Taiwan seems to say that now the fact that there's several, how can I phrase this? It's okay, figure it's fine. It's actually, no, I'm curious about, it's a bit like there were several waves of people coming to Taiwan and everybody identified with a particular wave. So you knew that the ancestors, they came from a particular province of China 300 years ago. Then there were the people that were originally here, the originally, then there were the so-called Baishenren that were also a particular wave. Well, I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I think we all came from there. So people say that, you know? Of course, like it depends where you go back or in terms of where you go back. So my question is, it seems that before people identified from this particular wave, this particular region and now more and more of the Taiwanese society is or expresses some kind of multi-layered identity. Does it make sense? Yeah, the plurality I talk about, right? Not a singularity, plurality. Exactly, and I was talking to someone who said, look, I can feel Taiwanese, but still be proud that I speak Mandarin and I can read the literature from China. So it's this thing that I'm also curious about, like if you have a feeling that this is like coming up right now, this feeling of, and is it new for you? I can be proud that I read JavaScript or something. But yes, I mean, yeah, so I'll phrase it this way. Okay. So nowadays in Taiwan, we've got 20 national languages, including sign language and implication are vast. For example, we're now looking on ways for people who only know sign language to nevertheless make and receive phone calls without any cost, right? So I think this means that the inclusiveness is not just about diversity. This is about celebrating the strength that we've got 20 national languages, that we've got many cultures, that when we're talking about marriage equality, we don't mean, again, just this model or that model, but rather we can look at the Amis nation, which is a majority. We can look at the Taiwan nation, which doesn't care about gender when choosing successes and so on. So there's many lineages that you can trace each and every person who identify as Taiwanese. But I think one thing in common is that we celebrate this plurality. And do you think that is the coming of agent of this particular, because also, I'm trying to make a parallel here. We've met with people that were very much involved in the long road to freedom. Yes, we spent time with the daughter of Nailen Chung. And I think it's interesting for us because it also shows that there's a maturity in Taiwan that accepts to look at its past. What do you feel about this? Do you think that, because it's still a very young democracy, so what is your understanding of where in this transition to democracy in Taiwan, do you think it's already there? Do you think it's a progress to be done? What would you say about this? Okay, it's hard to phrase that as not an answer by a statement. You're gonna answer it. To me, I talk more about democratization than democracy in Taiwan, because I believe for people my generation, democracy is not a noun. It is a verb. It's something that our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation struggled, paid huge cost so that we enjoy the freedom of speech, the freedom to assemble today. But nowadays, of course, on the internet and in more authoritarian regimes, in the time of pandemic and so on, there's all sort of new challenges to which democracy was seen as not necessarily the best answer in other corners of the world. But I think we feel a obligation to show, especially after Hong Kong, to show in this area of the world that no democracy is actually still a very good rebuttal to these overcoming those challenges. And so this idea of democratization becomes then continuous. Like you look at a new challenge and you think about how can we be even more democratic in order to resolve this together instead of saying we have to go back to some authoritarian ways of doing things because it's an emergency. So it's quite telling, for example, that during the pandemic, our president never declared a state of emergency, never even entertained the idea of declaring a state of emergency. Everything our administration did must be subject to the legislature approval and based on existing rule of law that established the parameters, for example, on habeas corpus, on privacy, on personal freedom and things like that. And that was because I think everyone here wants to prove that democracy is alive and well and it can thrive in the face of those incoming challenges. So to me, democratization is a continuous thing that will probably pass on to the next generation which will have new challenges and hopefully they will also innovate on democracy. So be open to be humble to our next generation so they can be even more democratic than our generation, I think is one of the running thread during the past few generations in Taiwan. And do you have the feeling, I have two more questions. Sure, sure. Do you have the feeling that things, I mean, we're talking about where Taiwan is heading and at the same time the threat to this model and to democracy here is reported everywhere in the world. You know, that's the rhetoric of Xi Jinping and what he said about Taiwan coming back to China before 2049. So are you optimistic about where Taiwan is heading with this threat looming somewhere near in a way? Yeah, I think Taiwan is firmly part of the democracy networks of the entire planet where people think that it is actually means something to have the diversity of thought, of the freedom of thought so that when new things come is someplace in the world someone will innovate on some new ways of encountering this challenge and then these innovations will spread with the freedom of speech and assembly and everything implicated by that, right? So I think as long as we are part of this democracy network as long as this pin says Taiwan can help we provide useful models to other places around the world and how to overcome these new challenges. I don't think our democratic partners will see us going back to authoritarianism through annexation, right? So I think especially this year after certain geopolitical events I think there's a reinvigoration of the democratic partners not just looking after each other but collaborating actively with each other so that we send a collective message to authoritarian regimes that it doesn't pay to try to annex one of us. Maybe it pays more to democratize yourself. And you're also famous because I mean in the face of this threat the fact that Taiwan is not present in international organizations, for example. You very ironically tried to intervene on international forums. Perfect, yes. What can you tell us about this? How do you see this acts of resistance? Can you tell us what you did for our audience and a little bit like how for you this is also sort of promoting a model versus the overshadowing of China, I think. Sure. So way back when I first become the digital minister because I don't like jet lags and I'm conscious of the carbon footprint. I don't travel that much to international forums via airplane. So whenever possible, I prefer to appear through telepresence sometime just as a tablet, but sometime as a full-fledged telepresence robot that can walk around and meet people and say hi. So it just happens that in one of the meetings that I was invited, I cannot enter with my own passport because it was a UN meeting, United Nations meeting, a Geneva and the UN Geneva building famously checked passports and if it's not part of a UN member, you're well, I'll have trouble entering. So I didn't fly there at all, but arranged so that the telepresence robot, which is a double robot which doesn't need a passport, by the way, just enters the venue. When it's time for me to speak, I would just sitting here and then just speaking and people when they raised their hand, I just turned the robot to face them and so on. So it's all good and well, except of course the PRC delegate to the UN Geneva meeting seems to have a hard time processing all this. And so he raises hand in protest and so on, but very significantly, neither the robot or the delegate from Beijing left the room. So that creates a new precedent because under certain interpretations of a certain resolution of the UN, there could, based on this Westphalian idea, there could only be one representative in the room and if they cannot chase that someone else out, then they themselves must leave, otherwise it creates so-called double representation. But what I did then become a kind of new precedent because it's not a representation, it's a representation of me, right? It's literally just presenting me. So my image, I mean, so I guess at the end of the day, they put everything on record, including the protest and everything I said under my name, but it's like they're watching a movie of me, right? Which was recorded half a second ago, but anyway. So ever after that, I participated in many UN related meetings, but I did so through telepresence. The only one, I think during those couple years that I presented in person was in Vatican for the UN Sustainable Development Science Network. And that's because Vatican recognizes our countries. So I think the point I'm making here is that there are really ways to think beyond the Westphalian model of things. And on the internet, for example, regardless of which jurisdiction you're in and whether they recognize Taiwan, if you type digitalminister.tw, you get to my website, you get to my computer. And so it seems quite clear that while Taiwan's international position is still being deliberated by the international community, the .tw domain name is a fact that it exists and it maps consistently to my computer. And so in many international forums where I couldn't appear as digital minister of Taiwan, I simply put my name card, which is written on my name card also, as digitalminister.tw. And so far so good. Nobody ever protested that I'm a domain owner of digitalminister.tw because, well, it is a multi-stakeholder forum, the internet forum, and we also made sure that we didn't say anything Westphalian when speaking in such positions. So in a sense, I guess I hacked the international multilateral system, so it become a little bit more post-Westphalian. And final question, do you think Taiwan can hack its way back into international relations and hack its way back to the U.N.? How? Because I understand the humor behind it, yet there's still a problem of representation for Taiwan in this particular institution. How do you see this? Is there a limit to the hacking in the humor, or do you think it's actually fair and constructive? I'm just gonna take that one somewhere. I think it's very constructive. For example, when I signed the declaration for the future of the internet, alongside Japan, the U.S., and federal from Ukraine, and so on, there's like 60, right? Potness, signing this together. So it entirely sidestepped the notion of whether it is a country, a jurisdiction, a nation, a state, and so on, because it is, after all, the future of the internet. So this is like 60 top-level domain names and there are re-presentations. Signing on something that is very important is about keeping the internet plural, not captured by any centralizing forces or entities, and yet this entire diplomatic exchange, I mean, it's signing a declaration together, is happening in a way that is entirely orthogonal to the Westphalian system. And Taiwan is a full partner, not a observer or anything, to the signing of the declaration. So for the, for example, a summit for democracy, not of democracy, because otherwise it's like people who didn't attend wasn't democratic. Summit for democracy, a very similar approach was given, right? So we're, again, just democratic partners and so on. So I think it is really constructive because every president creates the more room for the future presidents, for the other jurisdictions to treat Taiwan as a full partner on something without, as you said, referring back to any particular year in resolution. Very good. Perfect for me. Excellent. Thank you so much for your time and your answers. Yes. I love that you're able also to take it with a little bit of a, how would I say that, the ganache or a little bit of a step to the side, you know, like a little bit tongue-in-cheek at some time, at some point. Humor over humor. No, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.