 Minister, thanks so much for your time on Bloomberg Television. So I mean, I've been covering Taiwan for many years, over 30 years, right? So I know that it has a reputation for being fairly progressive, at least the most recent iteration of the government under President Tsai Ing-wen. But surely there must be gaps in equality in many areas, whether it's gender or in pay inequalities. Where is the most pressing need to narrow those gaps? Yeah, a couple of years ago the main answer would be that we haven't passed marriage equality law. But now that we have passed marriage equality, the attention is now on non-binary or the intersex and queer rights. Nowadays, if you arrive to Taiwan on the kind of quarantine self declaration, there's already male, female, and non-binary choices, but we have not changed our entire household registration system to reflect that reality. Now how does that non-binary perspective and thinking on your part, how does that allow you to survive in what is a very polarized political environment in Taiwan and anywhere in the world? Yeah, as I filed my HR form when becoming a digital minister, I see two boxes. One asking about my gender, which I filled in none, like Wu. And then also as my party affiliation, and I also filled in none. And so in my mind, there's no half of the world that's different from me. Having gone through two puberty personally, I see everybody as sharing similarities with me, so that I can better empathize and also take all the sides. Well you see the equality, but do others see you as equal? How does your orientation as a trans woman affect what may be some discrimination there? Do you face discrimination still? Well, back when I was eight years old, like 30 years ago, of course there was a certain discrimination. The society have not yet embraced gender mainstreaming, but since the past 12 years or so, the entire government has gone through gender mainstreaming work so that for each and every of our major budgets, regulations, laws, and so on, a gender impact assessment is done so that the professional civil society leaders lead and coach our civil service workforce in the past 12 years toward gender mainstreaming. So now I'm very proud to say that I face no discrimination whatsoever. Now, I believe President Tsai Ing-Wen reached out to you in part because you did not necessarily have a party affiliation. But we know the party politics are quite fierce in Taiwan, between the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party of Tsai Ing-Wen, as well as the KMT, which on reputation is more stodgy, kind of more set in its ways. Do you see if there's a political change in Taiwan that some of the progress that you've seen could be, could go by the wayside? Yeah, definitely. I often say that in the global goals in the 17 sustainable development goals, blue green are just two colors. There are 15 other colors. And I publicly associate myself as a supporter of a new party. It's called literally the Can't Stop This Party or the Very Happy Party. It's done by a few YouTubers and who enjoy this idea of what we call humor over rumor. That is to say, whenever there's outrage conspiracy theories and things like that, we'll use cute dog pictures, cat pictures, and so on to make fun of the issue, but not make fun of other people. And then once people laugh about something, they will not go on on a kind of, as you said, polarized expedition that is to say personal attacks based on outrage, but could actually sit down and talk about our different positions and arrive on common values. I think that is something that we're agreeing on nowadays. Well, clearly you have a renaissance brain, right? You have an IQ, I understand, of around 180. The rest of society... That's my height. The rest of society maybe does not have that same level of intellect. And this is an economy as well that is dominated by manufacturing, right? How do you see the discrimination or the lack of equality throughout the tech space in Taiwan, manufacturing, chip manufacturing and the like? Yeah. I think in Taiwan, inclusion is very important so that when we roll out our broadband, for example, in both 4G and 5G, we have broadband as a human right. So anywhere in Taiwan, if you don't have 10 megabits per second, even on the top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters, the Jade Mountain, it's personally my fault. It's very affordable too, like $16 per month for unlimited data connection. And so in our K-12 curriculum, we place a lot of emphasis on even if people are not that much into mathematics or science or technology or so on, but if they're into the arts and something, they can learn about media competence that is to say, become their own producers of media instead of just consumers of media, which would be media literacy. What do you think needs to be done to bridge the gap in pay inequality between men and women in Taiwan? Do you see it significantly? No, we have a gender impact assessment dashboard. And for the past 12 years, each and every of our major policy has been done to make sure that there is equal pay and equal opportunity. We do see, like in a homemaker's role, people who are above 40 years old and so on still does primarily on women, but even that is changing for the 20-somethings and 30-somethings. So I think we're firmly on the right road. And the recent epidemic that placed teleworking and telehealth and telemedicine on the front of everybody's mind also helped equalize the playing field. Tell me how the mix in government is changing as well. I mean, I've interviewed the likes of Freddie Lim, who is a death metal singer. I've interviewed Jason Xu, who's the crypto congressman or was. And now you as well, the digital minister. How is the government becoming younger and more progressive? Yeah, so you haven't yet talked to MP Lai Pingyu, who is a 20-something cosplayer. There's a lot of diversity, and I'm really happy to see not only there is intergenerational solidarity. For example, Freddie Lim really connects the people of the very old generations of the first generation democracy fighters in Taiwan to the very young, like teenage people who want to learn more about the Taiwanese history and so on. I think this is a really good sign that in Taiwan democracy is something that all generations are into. And we celebrate diversity as a symbol of the idea of democracy must come from the grassroots. How have your efforts in open source and accountability and the like help Taiwan really weather the COVID-19 pandemic better than many, many countries around the world? Well, there's a saying that I tweeted. In democratic Taiwan, ministers trust you. And so basically instead of asking citizens to trust government, we the government trust the citizens with open source, for example, open data. In Taiwan, in every pharmacy, you can get your national health insurance card, which covers 99.99% of not just citizens, but also residents. And every two weeks, you can collect nine medical masks, a very adult, 10-year-old child. But instead of trusting the numbers of the government's publication, people trust each other because they can check on their phone that the mask availability decreased by nine or 10-year-old child. And the person queuing after you can see it reflected in real time on their phone using more than 100 different voice assistant chatbots and things like that. So this is participatory accountability. And instead of saying, oh, the government knows the best or can collect the statistics every day and so on, we trust the people who then take this trust to trust each other and the pharmacists. Wasn't there some sort of crowd sourcing hack done in the private sector to kind of track via social media input the availability of masks and where they're available, their availability was using Google Maps. And that was done something like a month well before the WHO declared a global pandemic. So Taiwan in that sense was way ahead of the curve. Yeah. The crowd sourced mask availability map from Howard Wu or Wu Jiangwei of Tainan City was indeed launched in January, which is way before pretty much everybody else. And in early February, I look at his work and talk to our premier, Su Zhenchang, saying, hey, this person from the civil society does a better job of presenting the mask rationing policy than we would ever do. So maybe we do a reverse procurement and just make sure that we fulfill whatever API needs that he needs. And then after that, like Vingeng Qiong and many other people across Taiwan made different versions of that so that people with color blindness, with hearing difficulties and so on all can use the kind of inclusive access so that they can access the same information. And that also showed the civil society that if they have a better analysis, for example, on the distribution, inequality and so on, they can just do an inquiry on the 1922 toll free number. And then very next day we change our distribution algorithm based on the citizen's feedback. Now, I'm not sure if you met personally with the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who came to Taiwan recently, but what kind of advice or from the lessons learned in Taiwan did you or could you give to the United States, which obviously is leading the world in outbreak cases as well as deaths? Yeah, I did not meet Secretary Azar in a flesh in person, but I did talk with him a few days before the world has assembly in a 14-country virtual pre-WHA assembly organized by Taiwan with a lot of top health officials. My main message at that time was around mask use. And I say in Taiwan, we figure out a way to disseminate the idea of mask wearing and it boils down to this. We wear a mask to protect ourselves from our own unwashed hands. And so this connects soap use like hand washing and the mask use in a way that primarily appeals to person's self-interest. And we discovered that this meme, this idea that we're spreading maybe has the highest R value as compared to every other idea for mask use. And I think in Taiwan, we have perfected the idea of a spoke stock or zong chai. I think Secretary Azar was very interested about and this zong chai illustrates the point I was just making. So this is a spoke stock of the health and welfare and the dog is saying that you wear a mask to protect yourself from doing this. And the dog also illustrates for example physical distancing and so on many other policies. Are you afraid though the world is becoming too isolated? There's too much bunker mentality and not enough sharing of information and maybe a bifurcation of the tech world between China and the United States. Even Taiwan more recently has banned the video streaming sites like ITE from Baidu, WeTV from Tencent. Is that kind of bunker mentality stifling, going to stifle innovation and investment in Taiwan? I do not think so because back in 2014 when we occupied the parliament for three weeks in the sunflower movement there was already substantial deliberation on the street with half a million people and many more online on this very topic. At a time our 4G connectivity was still being built and we deliberated whether there are private sector market players in the PRC, the People's Republic of China regime that we can use for 4G. And the consensus both in the street and the National Communication Commission was no because there was no pure play private sector companies because at any given time their party branches can just swap leadership in those vendors and therefore the total cost of ownership of reassessing each upgrade will be much higher than this warranted. And so we built entire 4G system and now we're talking throughout my 5G connection obviously with no PRC components and so Taiwan is doing just fine in the past six years with no PRC components in our communication infrastructure. Minister Tang I know I've gone a little bit longer but I want to end just on something on how you usually end your presentations. I understand you like quoting Leonard Cohen who is known for saying what there's crack in everything that's how the light gets in, right? That's right, yeah. So how come the world is in the dark still on how to contain this pandemic? Well I think first of all of course where a lot of people are working very diligently on vaccines and also on the efficient distribution of vaccines which is one of the lights that will eventually come in but I think this is also the first time that the international community focus on a common subject of equal importance regardless of the jurisdiction like when we talk about climate change for example the smaller islands feel it's more urgent and larger land masses feel it's less urgent but nowadays every place is just two months before or after every other epicenter. So I think we will remember the solidarity of working on a common problem and that will enable us to tackle more international scale issues down the road so indeed there is a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in. Is there anything else you wanted to add that I didn't ask you that you would really like to let the world know through the Bloomberg platform here? Yeah I would just say well good local time and I wish all of you live long and prosper. Yeah Star Trek here we go. Okay take care thank you very much for your time. Thank you.