 Ana Nicola, chair of the Foundation for the Advancement of Liberty, the Libertarian Foundation in Spain, and this is Leaders, the live stream program where I bring to you exceptional personalities, true leaders, whose contributions to make our world a better place to live, to love, to cooperate, to work, to trade, to help one another, to be happy, deserve to be known and shared, and of course, applied worldwide. In today's program, I will be interviewing such an exceptional woman, Ms. Audrey Tang, digital minister for Taiwan, also known in the international community as the other China, the free, democratic, and prosperous China. Huang Ying, welcome Audrey, thank you for agreeing to take this time to be with us in Leaders. Hi, good local time everyone, really happy to be here and looking forward to the next hour and a half. Let's start with a simple question, who is Audrey Tang and why did you decide to become a politician and of course, what is a digital minister? So we kind of invited ourselves in when we occupied the parliament in 2014 in the sunflower movement. At the time, the parliament were refusing to deliberate substantially a trade service deal with Beijing, and so the people took the office of the MPs and did the job of the MPs, which is the liberation in their office or so goes the legitimacy theory. And then was half a million people on the street and many more online. We helped the 20 NGOs across the occupied parliament to deliberate through each aspect of the CSSTA, the so-called cross-strait service and trade agreements, and come to a rough consensus on the street on important things such as at a then very new 4G infrastructure, should we or should we not invite PRC, People's Republic of China, the other jurisdictions components into our tenders and procurements. And the consensus on the street was no because they could be de facto state controlled at any given time. Their party can just plug and play leadership within so-called private sector companies through party branches. And so for us, the overall cost of ownership if we use PRC components is actually a higher because every time we upgrade, we have to reassess the political and cybersecurity risk associated with PRC components. And the great thing about the Occupy is that it's a victory. The head of parliament eventually just agreed with all the demands of the occupiers and the end of that year on the mayoral election, or the mayor that supported open government gets elected and the mayor that didn't, well, didn't. And so the political norm changed in Taiwan. And people aspire to see democracy as a technology itself that you can improve and participate and innovate day to day, not just uploading three bits every four years, which is called voting, by the way. And that's the story of me first being a occupiers facilitator, and later on being a kind of reverse mentor, a young reverse mentor to the cabinet at a time. And then later on to be kind of promoted from intern to full minister, still working in the same office for the past four years now. And so, yeah, I think I'm not seeing myself as a kind of elected politician because I'm twice removed. Our president is directly elected. She appoints the premier who appoints me. I see myself working with the Taiwanese government, not for, and working with the people, not for the people, and basically kind of as a Lagrange point between the social movement on one side and the government on the other side to catalyze innovations that serves where the common value, despite our very different positions in the society because we're a liberal democracy. And so that's a little bit of me. I also quit middle school when I was 15 years old, telling the head of my school that I'm learning things from the Y web that's 10 years more advanced than anything I can learn in school. And the head of school actually agreed with me and said, OK, from tomorrow on, you don't have to go to school anymore. And I would then go on to found quite a few startups working on web technologies and work with the Internet Governance Community, which is a fabulous open multi-stakeholder political system that still powers the Internet, well, the open part of the Internet today. So I'm a rare believer in that the public servants are the most innovative people of all. OK. So I will start with the economic model that Taiwan has. Taiwan is a free market economy. For instance, for the audience to know, Taiwan is the 18th economy in the world in terms of importance and holds the 17th position both as exporter and importer of goods. And here in Europe, for the European Union, Taiwan is the fifth, let's say, country with whom we cooperate and we trade. So Taiwan, it's a reality. How did you get here to be one of the major and prosperous economies worldwide? Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, because I'm not even 40 years old, so I'm mostly relating on other people's work is certainly not my work. But I think two main ideas stood out. One is that we believe very strongly in mechanism design. In designing a market that is kind of by competition actually creates public value. For example, our 5G auctions of the spectrum is such an example. In Taiwan, broadband access is a human right anywhere in Taiwan. If you don't have 10 megabits per second, it's just 15 euros a month. Even on the top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high. That's my fault, literally, is my fault personally. And I'll see to it that it's fixed. And because we understand that broadband access and before that internet is a human right is a fundamental enabler of economies. So the government always designed the auction rules so that there's a lot of surplus money that the five telecoms have to bid in order to win the best parts in the spectrum. But these funds are not just taxed, right? It's always reinvested completely into enabling the rural and remote. And at the moment, still not very much into startups and so on places to enjoy the first 5G connectivity so that the innovators will actually go to these places where self-driving vehicles, self-driving ships, the drones that help the agricultural plants to grow and so on are not a nice to have, but they are must have because of the age configuration, the aging society and so on. These are the places that needs it most. And therefore holds the most potential when it comes to the social return of investment. And so basically we balance the right wing competition based strategy with the left wing, like the social protection of people's health and communication rights and education rights. So it's a very balanced kind of upwing idea and strategy of how we make sure that the market regulates itself instead of a top-down way of like an administration takedown of free speech or administration lockdown in the name of the counterpandemic or anything like that, that will of course hurt the market. And so the other thing is that the self-regulation of the market and the society, the communication between the economic sector and the social sector is very strong. And so for most of the things the government does not need to step in. And that's also very libertarian, I guess, in terms of the strategy that we choose. And it really paid off. I mean, this year we're seeing the unemployment rate at below 4%. The GDP is actually growing amidst the pandemic. And so, yeah, I think it really paid off these twin principles of kind of balanced upwing principle and also if the government can step off and the citizens are worthy of trust, we trust the citizens before the citizens trust the government. Do you have specific labor laws to regulate in detail how, for instance, working from home is or how can you start the business? Because in many countries, I'm thinking here in Europe, even in Spain, let's say that you have to pass through several processes in order to start the business that will take several weeks and in some cases, even months. You are not allowed to work from home freely. I mean, there are several factors that the government has to decide whether this applies and is considered working from home or not. How have you managed with this whole labor market situation, and especially now with the COVID? That's literally the first thing I worked as a reverse mentor, as an intern, essentially in 2015 to minister Jacqueline Tsai at the time, because we were cross sourcing the rulemaking on telework. And we need to do the consultation entirely through internet and live streaming because there's no teleworker's union. There's no such thing as a teleworker's union. There's union in each and every trade, but there's no teleworker's union. And there's also no business associations of all the companies that starts up and register at Cayman Islands. Again, there's no such business association because they all register on the Cayman Islands. And so when we want to make sure that a company law is updated so that it both take care of people who choose to work at home instead of the archaic, but very well-meaning regulations, such as women are forbidden to work after 10 p.m., but if you're a teleworking, that's actually when you have time, right? So these outdated, but very well-meaning regulations need to be well-consulted and adjusted for the digital era. And so we designed the consultation process V-Taiwan, which will end up also working, for example, with the Uber case, which makes a really good case as the algorithm can help where the people can save energy and share more if they use app instead of the taxes just driving idly on the street, right? But also, of course, potentially hurts the existing taxi fleets and co-ops. And so they also need to be digitally transformed and enabled into the app-based economy. And so we also cross those people's common ideas around these. So long story short, I think it's very interesting that we're able to use AI, for me it's assistive intelligence, to prove that we're actually having a lot of common ground, no matter which ideological camp people belong in. We all believe in, for example, proper insurance for people who sit in the backseat of Uber. We all believe in registration of such essentially driving for profit cars. But we also all believe in that you have a dynamic meter, if you have surge pricing and so on, the market is more efficient. So people have more in common than they know. And then we make the new regulations and so on using such consultation processes. So by the time that I become the digital minister in 2016, we have a pretty robust telehealth and telework regulations. Which will in 2017 also expand to the non-remote areas that people can elect to do telemedicine and telecare as well. And afterwards in 2018, pretty much all of the company's registration and everything can be done in a one-stop manner. It's entirely digitized. You can even file your personal taxes in your nearby convenience store without going into any particular staff in the government and so on. So it's pretty good, I would say. And all of it really paid real dividends during the COVID because this kind of decentralized work that people can use their national health IC car to collect the medical masks anywhere in any pharmacy or convenience store and so on, really helped us to combat the pandemic without resorting to top-down lockdown strategies. So I'm curious, this labor works of working from home, for instance. In your case, are you really regulating how, for instance, a person's how many hours per day should be considered working from home when they have to sign in and all these kind of details that normally businesses should be able to establish, depending on their needs, their company's needs, not like a general rule, or is there some very detailed general rules inside the labor law that decides what has to be done by everyone? Yeah, that's a great question. So basically, we have a very large overarching just definitions that equates, for example, the check-in and check-out ideas, what constitutes as time of taking a break, and also how to prove such records and with distributed ledgers and so on. It's getting easier and easier. And so all of this is like just seven definitions of traditional labor law concepts to the teleworking scenario. And that's it. It fits one A4 page. And then there's guidelines that are not general but specific. For example, there's a guideline for media journalists. There's a guideline for programmers and designers. There are guidelines for drivers and things like that, and which goes into more detail. But these are done by consultation with the actual people doing those work, not a top-down way of the Ministry of Labor pre-defining everything because there's bound to be other teleworking scenario that we cannot yet think of. So for us, it's more like equating ideas in the face-to-face scenario and then just those seven ideas transplanted into the teleworking scenario. And that's it. Okay, because I'm quite interested in this aspect because now in many countries, Spain including, the government is negotiating with the unions and also with the entrepreneurial associations. How is going to be this new regulation labor about working from home? And it seems to us that they are going to regulate it in so many details because unions are quite demanding of that, that the new law appears to put a very bureaucratic and costly weight, especially on the small and medium businesses that are not going to be able to fulfill with all that this new regulation law is going to ask from them. And this is a very, very good approach. So I hope our officials here and in other countries that are now discussing this kind of labor market regulations will take into account in order to ease the doing business in our countries and not to make it more difficult. I believe that is why Taiwan, for instance, is in the top 20 of doing business index this year. And we, for instance, in Spain are in the 30 position of this index. How? I wanted to ask you a question that, for instance, I know our audience is going to be quite interested. Is it true that anyone in Taiwan can literally start the business in 24 hours without having to file endless paperwork, waiting for months to have all the licenses and then having to pay taxes and having to fulfill a lot of bureaucracy in order to pay taxes every few months? Yeah, that's exactly the case. And it's called the one-stop platform. And we use that idea, the one-stop platform, not just setting up companies, but to pretty much anything, like if you want to go to a hiking and you go into the national parks or you go to the places that are indigenous lands and so on. There's the single shop hiking portal where you just enter, just like booking a trip. And then you will arrange the hotels and planes for you in a similar way. It will connect back to the ministries of Interior, the Indigenous Council, the agriculture community, and things like that. And so on the single interface, you will be automated to go through the steps associated with all the different instances. The same goes to applying a gold card, which is a special kind of visa, that if you are a foreign high-paid talent professional in any of the industries, you can switch your visitor visa into a three-year work-for-yourself visa. You don't need an employer to vouch for you. And then just convert like that and you can stay in Taiwan for three years and even enjoy our national health care system. And if you really like Taiwan on the 50th year, you can apply to become also Taiwanese without losing your original country passport. And so, yeah, it is a really well-designed way. And a lot of people use that design this year because Taiwan is so safe, they really don't want to go back after they visit Taiwan, maybe for a lunar new year and so on. So let's get to the next section of our program, the coronavirus. Why Taiwan is successfully fighting the coronavirus threat? Yeah. I think in a nutshell, it's because we have the three principles of fast, fair, and fun. And the fast part is the collective intelligence system. And this is very important because the earlier you respond to a pandemic, the easier the response becomes. And you do not have to resort to the more heavy-handed regulations such as the lockdown. And because in Taiwan, we rely on the collective intelligence of people to notice anything that resembles SARS, which we had experienced back in 2003. And so when Dr. Lee Wenliang, the PRC whistleblower shared on their social media at the time that there's, and I quote, seven new SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market. There's something that's actually shared there. Of course, in their speech environment, that quickly gets harmonized and deleted. But it gets reposted almost immediately on December 31st by a young doctor to the discussion board. The equivalent of Reddit in Taiwan is called the PTT. And so people upvoted it. And then we wrote to the WHO, asked what's going on. And then just as a precaution, the very next day, the first day of 2020, started health inspection for flight passengers from Wuhan. And so this says to me two things. First, the citizens really trust that we are, according to Civicus Monitor, the only truly open, completely open speech environment in the whole of Asia. And so they can freely talk about possible new SARS cases without fearing repercussions, right? And so because the journalist's words in Taiwan is as good, if not better, compared to a minister's word, they can report the upvoted idea that there's SARS coming back again. Also, the government trusts that this is enough. So when it's uploaded, the medical officers immediately started the responses of health inspections instead of wasting time. They immediately started the CCC, the Central Epidemic Command Center, around mid January, even before we have the first locally confirmed cases and set up the TOW3 number 1922, which everybody can dial in. And there's a huge call center with a knowledge base, a lot of chatbots and so on, that helps people to feel calm and collected. But most importantly, when a genuine social innovation happens, for example, back in April when a young boy called to say, oh, I don't want to go to school because you're rationing masks and oh, I have this pink medical mask. Why don't you let me pick the color? My classmate will laugh at me for wearing pink. The very next day in the daily press conference, all the medical officers wore pink. And the minister himself said that pink panther was his favorite childhood hero or something. And so that boy became the most hip, most trendy boy in the whole class because only he had the color that the heroes wear. And so this kind of social innovation, a very quick turnaround, literally 24 hours, really helped to make sure that everybody faced a pandemic with this, oh, I can also help. This idea of Taiwan can help begins around February, which is also the time where we start mask rationing. And as I mentioned, because everybody has a national insurance card, the civic technologies certainly not through procurement, but through reverse procurement, they coded this up. And then we fulfill their API needs, their data needs, where people can very easily see which pharmacy's near them still have the mask in stock. And because it's like a distributed ledger, updated every 30 seconds in early February. So people nowadays, if you go to a pharmacy and you buy some mask, if you're an adult, that's nine per two weeks. Of course, there's also a free market next to the rationing nowadays. But if you choose to purchase the rationing, then the number will actually go down by nine. And in just a couple of minutes, people queuing after you can refresh their map and see exactly how many masks are being purchased by the people queuing before them. So this not only built trust between the civic sector players, but also the pharmacists, the 6,000 pharmacists who are trusted by their neighborhoods, don't have to absorb all the kind of accountability, responsibility, the system makes an account of itself, again, through mechanism design. So that people, when they see that, we're really ramping up the mass production from two million a day to 20 million a day. People can challenge our distribution strategy and use different data analysis methods based on the open API. And actually one of the MPs, MP Gao Hong-an from the Taiwan People's Party, did in her interpolation using her background as VP of data analytics at Foxconn to our minister, Chen Xu Zhong, saying that according to the OpenStreetMap, OpenSource community, your distribution, well, it seems fair. It's not exactly fair in here. It's why. And instead of defending, the minister simply said, legislator, teach us at the very next day, we wrote out the 24-hour pre-ordering system at a convenience store. And MP Gao was, of course, very happy and say yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's improvement. And this is our premier, smiling very happily. And so this is co-creation. And finally, because we understand people feel anxious during a pandemic, we always make sure that our scientific facts are communicated using cute dog memes. And so literally our spokes dog, sorry, the spokes dog is, I think, this one. It's called Zhong Chai. And then the spokes dog here reminds you to wear your mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands. So there's nothing like altruistic or collectivist or whatever about this message. This is pure out-of-self interest because we know the virus can survive on higher surfaces for days. It's likely that your hand will touch the virus at some point. So wash your hands with soap. It's as important as wearing a mask. And the mask is there to remind yourself don't touch your face without washing it. And so by making this essentially a again libertarian message, not a collectivist message, it actually increased our value of people willing to share this message because it makes sense. Even if a few people practice it, it protects themselves from themselves. So people share it much more willingly. The same goes for our social distancing rules, which is measured by the number of dogs, like two Shiba Inu outdoors and three indoors. Remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing. And so all in all, we make sure that our science, the humor, spreads faster than the conspiracy theories, the rumor. And so that is why we still remain common collected during the pandemic and why the three-quarter of people willingly put on their face masks around March, April time, and where the R-value become less than one and we no longer have a pandemic going in Taiwan. Many people, especially here in Spain and across Europe, would criticize without knowing, of course, how the private based healthcare system works for everyone in Taiwan. Can you explain how this system works in order to not leave people without medical care, even if they cannot afford it, you know, daily life? Sure, sure. Yeah, so the national healthcare system is single payer. It covers not only 99.99% of citizens, but also residents. And it's important because if we fail the healthcare for, say, migrant workers and so on, then we fail as a society when it comes to public health. And so including them in the healthcare net is actually a more cost saving than excluding them and leave them in the hands of private insurers. And so that's the basic healthcare. But on top of the basic healthcare, of course, there's a vibrant medical business industry for those not strictly necessary, but maybe make people look pretty pretty and things like that. Those more cosmetic and more fashionable kind of medical applications. Taiwan is very strong in that too. And so we at once have a really good social safety net to make sure that the PPEs and fundamental rights to visit the clinic and not incur a financial burden so people can feel at ease to report COVID-like symptoms that protects everybody. But then on top of it, we will also have a thriving biomedical business sector. Is the government really managing the whole hospitals, the clinics where the patients go to get treated or they are completely derived to private companies, foundations and other kinds of civil society entities? Yeah, of course, the hospitals and clinics they are not government run. I mean, there are a few government run, especially in the places who are like too remote and rural and people would not, it wouldn't make business sense to start a hospital there. And of course, the government, although many religious communities also crowdfund instead of hospital there too. But if even those religious communities cannot crowdfund, then at the end the government will do that. But that's strictly in a minority of the numbers of hospitals. So many hospitals, as I said, make money through kind of optional and opt-in treatments. But the basic healthcare, like the right of health, is managed by the national insurance. So the insurance is national, but if hospital and clinics are private or could be private. But they don't manage literally the hospitals like here in Spain and otherwise. Because it's a very often misconception that many people fear that if the hospitals are not run, literally run by the government, by the state, then the people are going to die on the streets without healthcare, without proper treatment. And this is a very important thing to understand and to make people here in Europe understand that it's not the same. And for instance, in the case of Taiwan, the healthcare system, run with private incentives of free market, really delivered and let's say protected the whole population from the COVID-19 and all the other pathologies. This is the main aspect. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there are also large corporations that run both an insurance service like life insurance service and also runs their own privately held hospitals. And also even privately held universities that teaches the medical practitioners. So it's normal in Taiwan. So Juan, the right of universal access to healthcare doesn't mean that a politician has to administer and manage the hospital where you are going to be treated. That's the idea. And this is why, for instance, the libertarian way of approaching it is more similar to what the system in Taiwan has. Yeah, it's essentially a financial design, right? A market design. It does not go to the front lines and micromanaging things. Yeah. What are the most important, let's say three measures any government should apply to successfully fight this healthcare crisis in general? What do you believe there will be three main aspects? I think I just said that, right? Fast, fair and fun. Fast in terms of timely response to the citizens ideas and respond to citizens in the here and now. Fair in terms of the basic PPEs such as masks and so on. And of course, very important soap and alcohol host hand sanitizers and so on so that people can witness the fairness of the system through, say, participatory accountability not necessarily blindly trusting the government but through distributed ledgers and other digital means, people can actually audit the system by themselves in a participatory way, which is an additional layer of fairness. And also the humor over rumor, the use of memes, like literally internet memes, because when people laughed about something, we're literally unable to associate it in long-term memory with outrage. And because so many conspiracy theory travels on outrage, we can't fight fire with fire. And so people who like professional comedians working with the government is very important because you need to get the memes out before the day closes because when people feel enraged about something and they go to sleep with that rage, and then they wake up, the long-term association is going to be on that outrage. And so responding within a couple hours, very important. Tell us a bit about the Solidarity Program. Taiwan started since this crisis. Taiwan helps. Taiwan can help. Sure. Yeah, you can read all about it actually in the website. Taiwan can help us. And the website, I think, is very interesting because also in a very libertarian way because it's not at all done by the government. It is done by a bunch of essentially YouTubers and who crowdfunded this whole thing that asked who can help and said Taiwan can help and said that you're not alone. Taiwan is with you. We know what you're going through. We know how hard it was in SARS epidemic. We have been isolated from a World Health Organization so we know how bad isolation feels like and we're contributing to international efforts. And then the timeline of our counter COVID playbook, the Taiwan model, and then a very special crash course on epidemiology by our at-a-time Vice President Chen Jianren who is also the textbook author of epidemiology. So he is both the top public health expert but also the public political authority, which is very rare. And then you can hear Dr. Chen Jianren who was around actually our hero in countering SARS 1.0. Now the hero returns and talks about SARS 2.0. Of course, it's translated to English and everybody can just remix it into different YouTube creations which you can find all about in hashtag talent can help. And thus but not the least, you can see that more than 700,000 citizens dedicated more than 6 million medical masks for humanitarian assistance. Of course, that's only about, I think, one-tenth or something of the entire dedication from our public sector and the industrial sector. But still it's something, right? It's from the social sector. So anyone who don't need that much rationed mask maybe because they're very clever and already bought plenty before the pandemic and have plenty of them at home, they can elect to not collect the rationed medical mask and then donate it either anonymously or with their name shown, like this is my name. So I will search for my own name and you can see that out of the humanitarian aid that we provided, 33 masks are under my name. But actually I only dedicated six. The other are from people who share parts of my name. So basically it's a data collaborative where people can trade the right for collecting the rationed mask to the right to brag about their dedication to humanitarian aid and is a kind of marketplace, except of course it's not trading Bitcoin or Ethereum but trading masks for the right to be shared on social media. And so that's part of the Taiwan Can Help campaign as well and you can read all about it and Taiwan Can Help. I was saying that Taiwan is a key member of the information and communication technology industry worldwide. What were the main reforms Taiwan did apart from the one platform you already mentioned earlier? Yeah, okay, that's a great question. And I think there are a few things that I want to share in my office which is just you're looking literally at my office. This is the Search Innovation Lab at heart of Taipei City and it used to be an Air Force kind of castle-like fortress but we tore down all the walls and now it's a park that anybody can walk in. And these soccer fields you see here are paintings by people with dance syndrome and they have a very unique perspective into the space so that when you step into it you feel that you want to start up something you want to do something creative. So for example, when the mayor of Prague Sinek Ryd visited Taipei, he and his team I think they're a pirate party people just climbed on this public installation art and just demonstrated a very playful mood and everybody can visit me with their digital ideas every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and have a 40 minutes of my time or 14 if they need a shorter consultation. The only thing I ask is that everything that we talk about will be made public through either a transcript or a video and because of that people can safely talk about the four aspects of the digital transformation and that digitization like replacing the wooden seals with electronic signatures so that you can start a new company sooner innovation like those self-driving vehicles that are emerging technologies that promise to transform our lives so we don't need human assistance carrying the flowers in the flower market or we don't need to kind of spray the fertilizers and things like that in the field and those self-driving cars and vehicles we'll do it all for us but also the governance part which is making sure the society understand the impact of the technology that has on the society and inclusion which is making sure that people who are closest to the pain who suffer the most at the moment from this society actually have the first chance to make use of such digital innovations and work the best with the startups and micro and small medium enterprises which is entrepreneurial spirit because for large businesses there's less incentive for them to work in the less included areas and so all four pillars need to balance itself and we do this through those radically transparent confrontations where people just bring their self-driving vehicles and ask how are you going to make it into more human-friendly and more friendly to society observe the social norms instead of one eye we make two eyes I will make sure that it can read people's emotions and people can read its emotions and things like that and experiment for like half a year or so in the sandbox before rolling it out in the field so that's the SDG idea effective partnership and the keyword is effective only when introducing those ideas we make sure that they're always a trilingual a tri-sectoral collaboration so in the social innovation lab every year now we host the judge panel of the presidential hackathon where 200 or more teams around the globe demonstrate how to use data to improve society and the top five winning teams receive a trophy from our president Dr. Tsai Ing-wen for their work for example on using AI to repair what replies more quickly to reduce plastics by a essentially Pokemon Go like app that incentivize people to refill their photos there's many wild ideas and each of the winners receive a shaped trophy like Taiwan and with a micro projector underneath that when they turn on the micro projector the projects are president Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing you the trophy and promising whatever your startup did in the past three months will become public policy in the next 12 months we'll do all the regulation personnel and also the arrangement of budgets to make sure that the infrastructure for your innovation to thrive is there so there's presidential power as a essentially a startup hackathon price and so this basically motivated public sector to innovate along with the private and the social sector because they know that this will work out better for everybody involved in the cross sectoral manner I want to ask you if you could give us a couple of examples of Taiwanese technology that we might all have at our home on our smart devices because I want people to understand that we are one global world that products manufactured in your country come and make our our lives better here in Spain and other parts of the world sure well the thing is that you're probably going to know more about bubble tea than Taiwan Semiconductor but the Taiwan Semiconductor Company of course probably actually with near certainty powers your electronic devices whether it's an AI chip whether it's a mobile phone chip or anything that is advanced like an iPhone or whatever they basically are the TSMC's main ideas of getting through to the semiconductor world with the cutting edge AI and delivery on the devices so that if you're a phone do anything like machine learning or things like visual cognition like Siri I personally work with the Siri team for six years understanding more than English human languages for the Siri than those assistive intelligences the device that computes them the optical and audio sensors that makes up the kind of outer shell I think majority of the Tesla cars components and so on came from Taiwan although it was not branded as Taiwan as the bubble teas are so maybe bubble tea still are easier to remember but of course there are also international brands like for bicycles the giant is a giant in many jurisdictions although it didn't quite say Taiwan giant so you may or may not know that is the Taiwanese brand the same goes for BenQ or Acer or ASUS and things like that actually I have it on my Revolut wallet the Taiwan semiconductor corporation so I personally know the great work they are providing all our society so let's get to another section to Taiwan today civil liberties not just economic freedom but to start with I would like to convey to you our condolences for the late president Lee Teng Hui who passed away at the end of July he was one of the main let's say actors in the transformation towards democracy of your country so we are deeply sorry for your loss thank you how was can you tell us a bit about the transition from an authoritarian government to today's Taiwan a liberal democracy where civil rights where human rights are fully protected and respected and where people can live their lives the way they see fit yeah sure I think president Lee really did the great transition from being a essentially authoritarian even under the martial law kind of appointed president to being directly elected this constitutional change actually a series of constitutional changes happened during his term as the president but he is also helped by the people who fought struggled for democracy who started movements after movements that fought for the freedom of the speech freedom of the press and so on and I still remember how it was like to have no freedom of speech and freedom of the press when I was young those my parents were journalists they have to self censor a lot and the review board of the ruling party is unchallengable is entirely opaque and whether it's something past censors or not and so this was not a happy time and both because I think right after the Tiananmen incident in Beijing where my dad was there actually until the 1st of June fortunately and then basically witnessed how bad it was when the government doesn't trust the citizens and the hope for reform is delayed if not entirely lost for a decade and so when a very similar movement occupied the square in Taiwan asking for constitutional reform president Li met the people the students who occupied promising essentially to take their ideas their demands into account and the same scenario would reappear back in 2014 it was just six years ago when we occupied the parliament asking for more transparency and accountability when deliberating across straight service and trade agreement with Beijing at the time the MPs were refusing to deliberate saying that's it's a domestic matter because you know they're just West Taiwan or something but I like international treaties which would have required full deliberation by the parliament so they try to shortcut it but the citizens that know so we occupy the MPs places and did the MPs work for them which is the deliberation and more than 20 NGOs many of them was roots in the original wild lily days when the martial law was lifted and right after the Tiananmen protest the idea is that their next generation the students of this generation learned from their successfully working campaigns from the civil right workers that first fought for women's rights for example instead of marrying into a family it's two individuals where that's generations of women's rights advocates one of them being our previously VP and that blue fought for and all the way into the more intersectional rights such as the rights for the queer and transgender people and of course the first in Asia to legalize marriage equality and define really fine really like gender agnostic marriage as between two individuals but not between two families so legalizing the bylaws but not the in-laws and that's through two referendum and one constitutional court ruling and so all this basically said to the citizen that if you don't like how parliament works you can actually do the MPs job you can go to the streets and instead of demonstration just as a protest demonstration as a demo this is actually also what some of the 15M movement in the municipal area at a time empowered by the internet is saying is that it's a demo of a new kind of policy making where people can deliberate and come to rough consensus on street and in a Thailand case it was very fortunate because again just like Mr. Lee Donghui did back around the time of the turn of century this time the head of parliament MP Wang Zingping did say that all the occupiers demand are met and he agreed to all of it and so after three week of occupy it was again a victory and the rough consensus of the decisions made in the streets literally like in doing our 4G infrastructure we should not incorporate Beijing sponsored components even though they're branded as so-called private companies when the state can replace leadership at wills through its party branches we know that the toe-toe cost of ownership reassessing the systemic risk every upgrade is too high and so it doesn't actually make business sense to include the PRC components in our 4G infrastructure and there was a consensus on street and then taken into the consensus in the national communication commission and so we have been PRC free for the past six years if not more and nowadays we're using 5G just fine and we work of course with Qualcomm Nokia and Ericsson and so on as well as developing our own 5G open-run technologies and so long story short I think this is about people having the empowerment of taking things into their own hands and also about wise leaders at the right moments at time saying that what the citizens mandate citizens will is in my heart and instead of my political will I will basically adhere to the citizens will and that's true democracy exactly it's encouraging to see that for instance Taiwan improved his position in the world electoral freedom index this is a global index that analyzes virtually almost every country in the world that we are conducting here at the foundation for the advancement of liberty and I remember several years ago Taiwan was still in the red area of insufficient electoral freedom and now has let's say come in a much better position you even gained 12 positions all of a sudden from one year to another and you are now in the first green area at least going towards more electoral freedom so I want to commend you for the efforts and the government for the efforts you are all doing in that area because it is important as you were saying that people to be empowered and to decide in many many aspects of their lives after all it's their lives not not exactly not the state's lives exactly we've seen during this program how Taiwan moved towards a free market economy but we are now also seeing what is happening to the neighboring Hong Kong what is happening with the new act on security that the regime from Beijing the communist China the dictatorship that you have as neighbor is enforcing upon this former colony of the United Kingdom what is your relationship with Hong Kong what thinks the Taiwanese government about this whole situation how is it going to affect let's say the situation in Taiwan now that the Chinese government seems you know to harden its line over civil rights and human rights in Hong Kong yeah I still remember before 97 like around the democratization process in Taiwan in the 80s later 80s in early 90s the press freedom in Hong Kong is one of the main ways the Taiwanese people fighting for democracy and freedom at the time can voice our stories to the international world is through the free press in the Hong Kong jurisdiction and it's interesting how things have been reversed nowadays now it's Hong Kong people using the Taiwan as a free place to run their previously harmonized bookstores the Taiwan bookstore has moved to Taiwan the Oslo Freedom Forum of course hosted in Taipei and I participated personally last year provided a place for the Hong Kong anti-elab protesters a safe place to interact with the journalism community the reporter is Son Fokria the reporter who is our borders have its Asia had quota now in Taipei providing the correspondence a safe place to voice their opinions without hearing state repercussions and of course nowadays the international NGOs that works on human rights and freedom and so on now all are considering relocating if not already they're a base of operation from Hong Kong to Taiwan so that we even have a specific hunt book for international NGOs to register in Taiwan prepared jointly by our foreign service the Taiwan Foundation of Democracy as well as the Ministry of Interior and so whether you want to register your international NGO as a office as a civil association as a foundation the resident certificate work permits text exemption and things like that there's this very simple easy to remember a hunt book and a dedicated office to walk you through that if you want to advocate for peace and democracy and civil liberties in the whole of Asia and relocate or locate your new Asia or Pacific or Indo-Pacific office in Taiwan and that's just a few things that we've been helping people working with Hong Kong and for Hong Kong at that okay so I mean it's it's quite sad that Taiwan for instance has has it's such difficult you know to be in the recognized as an independent free country and yet you exist you trade you are in a lot of relationship with all the democracies in the world but they still have a way to go in order to recognize fully Taiwan and it's a pity how can we do to help correct this unjust reality and to try and move forward into a scenario where Taiwan for instance can be a full member of the World Health Organization should if you were a member of this organization maybe many wrong things that were done in the past months would have been solved let's say because of your expertise of your knowledge of this current situation the same applies to any other international organization the World Trade Organization and so on how can we do to make more visible the cause of Taiwan yeah that's a great question so first of all again I will refer you to this youtuber cross earth cross funded website TaiwanCanHelp.us and you can spread the message with the hashtag TaiwanCanHelp that's it right and so this is a hashtag that is not monopolized by the official ministries in Taiwan this is a hashtag that anybody can use to say that Taiwan provides essential help not only on health for all but pretty much on all the 17 global goals no matter which global goal you're working on there's bound to be someone in Taiwan that have already thought about it innovated and open about the innovation so that you can very easily work in a cross sectoral partnership because in Taiwan we believe that the global goals are truly global and even though it's also called the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and we're not technically a member there's already three municipalities that's Taipei City New Taipei City and the newest one literally just a few days ago the Taoyuan City joining in I think Taoyuan was the 17th in a voluntary local review of the Sustainable Development Goals outlining all the 17 different ways that it can help other cities in city to city relationships which is also a great thing to have and also the digital realm of course Taiwan is willing to help to enhance reliable data you mentioned if we have full ministerial access at the WHO then the entire world can respond 10 days sooner because we understood it's a human to human transmission earlier than pretty much everybody else and encourage effective partnerships and also most importantly open innovation because when we share the innovations we share it in a way that respect the agency of other economists and jurisdictions we wouldn't like put people in a debt trap or things like that we share it with a open innovation in mind okay can you tell us about the new Taiwanese passport what implies from now on sure yeah the legislature has charged that the ministry of foreign service redesign our passport so that our passport is more easily identifiable and so if you want to take a look at the new passport coming I think January the first or sometime in January anyway it looks like this okay all right so to the left is the old passport with the kanji the hand character Zhonghua Minguo which to me always means a transcultural republic of citizens because Minguo is literally a republic of citizens but of course with the letters Republic China which was the original place where this idea of transculturalism and republic citizens originated with Dr. Sanya Sen and it also says Taiwan and passport underneath now the new passport to the right basically repeat three times the official name of the country but it's in a circle so you can choose to read from any particular word and then it still says the kanji Zhonghua Minguo to me the transcultural republic citizens but it puts Taiwan in the boat so that it's less likely to be confused with the PRC but the official name of the country of course is still around but you can also read it in other ways as well because it's now like a wheel and this is actually the latest consensus more than three quarters of Taiwanese people agree that like the Zhonghua Minguo Taiwan literally the transcultural republic citizens Taiwan or ROC Taiwan taken together is an identity that people are comfortable with so it shows those intergenerational solidarity building but also during the pandemic that we have more consensus as a nation of beautiful islands and swirling ocean that there's instead of the two parts like in two different identity in the same password is the same more cohesive identity a more transcultural identity on the new passport so that's going to take effect and people can renew their cover starting next January okay thank you very much minister we start now some of the questions that people send us for WhatsApp, Twitter on the YouTube chat we don't have much time because it was an intense and very very interesting interview with you you had a lot to say and we didn't want to miss anything so we are going to try and be as resumed as possible with everyone let's answer for instance Alejandro Moulet on YouTube asks you whether the Taiwan government is considering any type of irresidency such as the Estonian government put in place yeah I mentioned Taiwan Gold Card which is even better than irresidency it's a full residency right so of course you can convert your tourism visa into a gold card if you work on E whatever and I think this is a really really sweet deal because first of all it's renewable and you can stay for three years and reapply for another three years and if there's a very easy again not built by the government these are built by the thousands of people who already have a gold card and want to introduce it to other people and so yeah you can join the gold card community at townbuildcard.com you can check whether you qualify for the gold card go through the application process and discover the community and I think you'll find that in addition to the digital banking and so on and access to the single European market that the Estonian e-card holder enjoys this card actually offers many more things and you don't have to give up your own passport to become also Taiwanese and to enjoy the life in Taiwan and including of course the health insurance the very tele-friendly labor law the your family also enjoys these ideas and regards as well and also if you are working on cutting edge technology Taiwan really offers a really good sandbox for you to showcase your technology try it out with a early adopter mind community and see whether the idea works or you can co-create with our society that's what happens for example with Uber which is now a legal taxi fleet in Taiwan called Q-Taxi but in doing this promoted the existing taxi fleets and co-ops and so on to be now app based and enjoy search pricing and other innovative techniques that's only possible with a electronic not really electronic it was a digital meter but do you opt to this kind of residency also while living outside Taiwan for instance if I'm in Spain and I want to opt in for the residency of Taiwan do I have to go there physically and ask for it for the permit or can I do all the the formalities from my home here in Spain yeah that's a great question of course if you don't plan to stay in Taiwan at all technically I guess you can work to get the foreign citizens digital certificate through one of our embassies or representative offices but that's going to be quite limited use to you because we don't have a single European market for you to get access to I mean you can already do business in Taiwan as a foreign person in a foreign company there's a specific section of company law that and even if you're an NGO worker I just show you the handbook for setting up a representative office in Taiwan and so yeah the main impetus to get the Estonian EE citizen card which is the access to the bank recognized in the EU single market simply doesn't make sense in Taiwan's case but if you decide to of course stay in Taiwan for a while then of course it makes sense for you to apply for the gold card because it doesn't say that you have to have a Taiwanese employer it doesn't say that you have to you know give this much investment or any sort of like either in capital or in hiring Taiwanese people is just nothing like that it only says that you're a foreign talent that we want to stay in Taiwan more and that's the main message and it's harder to find a safer place on us right now except maybe for in Antarctica Taiwan is maybe the the safest place at the moment so that's our main main lure and also the food in bubble tea let's go to Twitter Ilanit asks you about surrogacy it would be interesting to know how the legalization proposal progresses in Taiwan thank you yeah that's a interesting question very short answer Audrey because we are running out of time okay right so I will be brief so if surrogacy does it mean by like women having a baby for another woman who is unable to do so by herself okay right so unfortunately that's one part of the legislation that's quite controversial in Taiwan and so we do not have surrogacy arrangement that Taiwanese people who require surrogacy and so on at the moment have to work with overseas partners but the like regenerative and the like if you have difficulty giving birth to two children and so on fertility tourism that's actually a really strong thing in Taiwan so like if you instead of working on surrogacy working on fertility tourism Taiwan is your good destination but maybe not that good at destination at the moment if you are considering Korea as a profession of surrogate let's go to a question on what's up is Taiwan using AI for security purposes airports more etc do you have an any agenda for it and also I'm going to relate to questions what do you think about the gossip that associate COVID or other health related issues with the 5G tech yeah so the first thing about assistive intelligence used in the context of border security there's a few things nowadays if you go back to Taiwan or visit Taiwan you have to spend 14 days in quarantine and there is a lot of AI to enforce that quarantine and you either go to a physical quarantine hotel and stay for 14 days or you can stay at your own place if you have your own bathroom but then your phone or if you don't have a phone government gives you one for 14 days and we pay you around 30 euros a day as a stipend for staying in the digital quarantine but then a chatbot a AI is going to check how you feel whether you're enjoying yourself are there sufficient cute dog memes for you to enjoy during those 14 days is the internet working well and so on and to care for you but if your phone goes out of the digital fence perimeter which is not determined by GPS or any more invasive top-down technology but rather it is just by the signal strength of the telecom towers which they are already collecting anyway for roaming services so if you break outside of that 50 or so meter radius a AI will send it as a mess to the local health workers and police institutions to check your whereabouts and whether you are still in the quarantine and if you break out of quarantine well you'll be fined 1,000 times of the stipend so you can fund 1,000 times more people I guess so people don't break out of the quarantine and that's why we very successfully we thank the people who received the stipend and stay in the quarantine and work with those AI chatbots but all in all it enable a very limited staff to manage a very large amount of people in home quarantine and by and large preserve the freedom and liberty of movement for people who already finished the quarantine and for people who have not traveled abroad so I think it's a really good use of AI in an ethical way and maximally privacy preserving because we've not declared a emergency stay at all so everything we do need to be based on existing collected data and its use and purpose need to be subject to the parliamentary oversight and interpolation let's go to another quick question on online education did you have previous to the COVID an already extended online education access for your school system or did you have to improvise a little bit with the whole COVID-19 situation but you see even when we delayed the opening of the schools the semester for a couple of weeks to make sure they're sufficient soap, hand sanitizer and mask in all schools the schools never closed we never had a lockdown and so the tele-education we already had is more like the digital opportunity centers in the more rural and remote islands and less connected places and these are put into good use when large gatherings are discouraged and people are in smaller satellite classrooms but we never go into the lockdown mode where the student have to spend their time alone at home so by the border quarantine use of assistive intelligence I just answered in the previous question I did not have to answer this question because the school never had a lockdown okay another one and this is the let's try and answer as brief as possible also on youtube Alejandro Moulet in your opinion minister what is the biggest challenge that is facing the taiwanese people right now yeah I think at the moment the biggest challenge is that as you mentioned in multilateral organizations our seeds and identities are keep being misrepresented and silenced over and quite a bit harmonized from those multilateral organizations on the other hand there are emerging mini lateral organizations such as the global cooperation and training framework recently of course the apex is also playing a good role for us on the international stage emerging hybrid organizations that are both multilateral and multi-stakeholder such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Network of academics or the open government partnership this provides a more equitable access for taiwan on the international stage and that is of course something that we look and aspire to contribute more to but the traditional multilateral like 170 member countries that sort of organization that is still the main challenge and that will need of course both the diplomatic support of fellow liberal democracies but it also needs support from those international multilateral organizations themselves the work the principle that they work with needs to be deliberated and make sure that the very weird things for example just by nature of the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia have a chapter called Wikimedia Taiwan the PRC member of the WIPO the World Intellectual Property Organization motion to block Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia to be observer in the WIPO simply because they have a chapter called Wikimedia Taiwan and so that sort of thing has a collateral to all the people working on digital freedom and civil liberties I mean it's basically bullying the Wikimedia Foundation to reclassify I don't know Wikimedia Taiwan as a provincial chapter or something like that or face the exclusion from WIPO where many of the sibling organizations of Wikimedia Foundation are already a member and observer of so more people need to be aware of this and share the hashtag Taiwan and the Health exactly the one final question Victor posted on YouTube I'm going to translate it because he he wrote it in Spanish do you believe that sometimes in the future we will know the true origin of the COVID virus 19 this is kind of conspiranoic yeah I certainly hope so I mean at some point of course we'll look back and reconstruct exactly where the virus came from how it you know gets there in the first place but I think meanwhile it's also important just to repeat what the spokes dogs say to wear your mask to protect you for your own and washed hands and I wish you live long and prosper thank you very much minister this was quite an interesting program today we are going to do more like this leaders program in the future so I hope you all can join us in in next episodes of this program that is made by the foundation for the advancement of liberty in the meanwhile I ask all of you to make the cause of Taiwan well known or all over your communities in your families your friends at your workplace because I believe Taiwan's is is an example of a country where people can live their lives freely can innovate can work and they even show an immense solidarity towards us and towards many countries that are now under this difficult situation created by the health health care crisis with the covid-19 but that clearly derived in an economic crisis even worse than that of 2008 so without any other considerations thank you very much Audrey Tang for this time you have with us and thank you share this content follow us on our social media share subscribe of course to youtube.com slash fundali and stay safe till our next program thank you live long and prosper bye