Today is 2019, September 14th, in the afternoon. I’m in Taiwan with Audrey Tang, a digital minister.
Our podcast series is looking at China’s impact beyond its borders. I think my first question is that there’s a lot of news coverage right now of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Part of this New Silk Road is a digital silk road that the Chinese talk about.
Does it in any way – this global campaign of theirs – impact Taiwan in any way? Whether it’s China looking at Taiwan as part of the Belt and Road Initiative or because it considers Taiwan not a separate entity? Whether it has a different, parallel strategy for Taiwan as opposed to its greater strategy for Belt and Road?
Well, we’re certainly a different jurisdiction. We are on the front lines of the global confrontation with our authoritarianism. With the Belt and Road, a lot of the export include the Great Firewall and related technologies that are predicated on the fact that they consider it should be radically “transparent” — but it’s making the citizens transparent to the state.
Whereas in Taiwan, we consider that it’s the state’s mandate to make the state radically transparent to the citizens. While you can see words like transparency just being bandied about, it actually mean two opposite direction end of us. Because of that, I think there’s a sharp contrast in the kind of systems that we offer in like-minded countries.
For example, we have setting out a dashboard for making the budget transparent. We work with Malaysia and Honduras in this year’s Presidential Hackathon to help them to detect fraud in procurement, to make sure that ecological activists have a real conversation, a meaningful conversation, that sets the agenda before any development.
All of this must be based on reliable data – that is to say, data that is mutually trusted by the social, private, and public sectors. Social Credit System and the Great Firewall, meanwhile, is exporting a radically different system moving in the opposite direction.
I do think that those two directions where we’re moving very fast, but in opposite directions, does make that delineation between the two jurisdictions very apparent to the international community.
Let’s back up very quickly. I apologize. I should start off by asking a question I always ask, which is if you can introduce yourself, “My name is…” and tell us a little bit about yourself, assuming our listeners do not know that much about Taiwan and what a digital minister does, and a little bit about what brought you here.
Greetings. I’m Audrey Tang. I’m Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement. I work with the government, not for the government, after participating in the Occupy of the parliament in 2014, the so-called Sunflower Revolution. Then we worked together with the administration since late 2014.
Ever after that, Taiwan has embraced a very different course that makes the state radically transparent to the citizens.
Before occupying the parliament, I was retired from maybe almost 20 years of working in the free software movement as well as with Silicon Valley companies.
Continuing our discussion about the digital data relationship between citizens and the government, and the government and the citizens, that’s very interesting. How do you see China’s Belt and Road Initiative? Is it exporting its model of the digital relationship and data relationship between government and the people?
It’s certainly trying to. On the Internet, there really is no law per se. There’s only code, the architectures. The jurisdictions when we work with Internet, that’s to say digital technologies, we rely on norms. There are things people usually do, and the Internet community calls it protocols, things that people voluntarily follow.
With the Belt and Road Initiative, PRC is trying to export its governance model, for example on data, which you just mentioned. There was a sense that there really is no way of breaking out of the Great Firewall without triggering a criminal law of some sorts now.
Just maybe five years ago, it was tolerated. It’s a gray area, but now it’s carrying a very hefty fine if you want to run a private VPN. They’re branding this as a “harmony-encouraging tool.” That is part of their governance package that they are trying to establish as a new cyber norm.
You mentioned VPN. Just for people who don’t understand what that is?
It’s virtual private network. It’s like a bridge between a part of the Internet that is very asymmetric. Meaning that if you are somewhere outside the .cn jurisdiction, you can connect to PRC websites relatively easily, but it’s almost impossible for people inside the PRC jurisdiction to connect to an outside website.
To make an asymmetrical connection more symmetrical, people sometime create what we call a hop, which is a server, a computer outside of the PRC jurisdiction that people first connect to, sometime in a way that is not overt.
Then, from there, connect to the rest of the world. Within the .cn, if you search for, for example, Tiananmen, you will get some pretty pictures. If you go through a virtual private network, and you search for Tiananmen, you will get some not too pretty pictures.
For example, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. If you are in China, and you want to go to those websites, you have to use a virtual private network. It looks like a software install on your computer.
It is, unless you are in a state-sponsored block of IP addresses – which means the Internet protocol addresses – that is specifically designed for people within the PRC to sow discord through disinformation and creation of fake accounts on Twitter.
Twitter shared the data set, the evidence, of those hundreds of thousands of accounts coming from a part of PRC that does not need a virtual private network. It must be state-helped, state-assisted, if not downright state-sponsored, in some way.
In terms of this digital Silk Road, we’re talking about data. Can you talk about it in two buckets, the software or digital part of it, and then there’s a tech hardware part of it, as well.
Yes. On the software part, data, as I mentioned, is treated as a beginning of a relationship. In Taiwan, we’re taking a more European point of view. Our privacy act is similar to the EU one before the GDPR.
After the GDPR, we’re now looking at our privacy act to make sure that we’re so-called GDPR adequate. It’s for people who haven’t known your GDPR rights. Even if you live in Europe, these refer to a set of rights guaranteed that, if you hand your personal data to a fiduciary…
We’ll call it data operator. You hand your sensitive data to your doctors, nurses, accountants, psychiatrists, lawyers, and so on, you would want them to act in your best interest. How would you know they are acting in your best interest? You ask them.
The GDPR is the set of natural rights associated with private data that you can ask for explanation of how the data is being used. You can ask for an update, deletion, and portability, meaning take your data elsewhere.
You find another nurse, doctor, or things like that and delete their copy, as well as the right to get an explanation of what’s going on. All this says that personal data is not a bucket of oil. It’s not an asset. It’s not something to be traded.
It is rather the beginning of a relationship where trust must be earned from the data operators. Each jurisdiction would have a data protection authority to enforce that kind of guarantee. In Taiwan, that will be the National Development Council doing the GDPR adequacy talks.
Then on the hardware side, how is the Belt and Road Initiative from China exporting tech hardware? How do you think Taiwan factors in all of this, if at all?
I think people have often focused on the telecommunication, both the fiber optic part of it, as well as the 5G network part of it.
Around five years ago, when the parliament here was occupied, one of the largest debate was that whether we would allow PRC so-called private sector components into our fourth generation infrastructure. That was when 4G was still being deployed and rolled out in Taiwan. At the time, which was 2014, we did a systemic risk analysis that asks this question.
Even if it passed the cyber security Internet standard audits today, if the network suffers from some catastrophic bug, which may or may not be intentional, would us accept the risk that they can push an update that we must activate in a very short timeframe?
The fact that this so-called private sector company may become de facto state controlled, using non-market forces. The answer from the risk assessment is that the risk is too high. We simply cannot do that.
Also, the other reason why we rejected any PRC components from our 4G network is that creates a path dependence. Even if we only install them on the periphery, or in the non-critical data centers and so on, when 5G comes, it’s very difficult to just imagine taking apart a railroad truck, as well as the rails themselves.
Then you have to build new trucks, new cars, and new rails just to build 5G. Of course, the natural tendency will be follow whomever that deployed the 4G network in the first place. Because of that, we’d had five years of experience of building a stack that is not reliant – indeed, cannot include – any PRC component at all.
I’m glad that the world is waking up to this conversation, but that’s a conversation we had a consensus five years ago.
You haven’t mentioned it, but you mean by this, Huawei and other Chinese companies, PRC companies?
They go by many other names. The simple thing is that, because in PRC, all large, innovative companies have to have a CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, branch installed within that company.
At any time, they can use non-market forces to force the leadership of that company to comply with the state interests. There’s zero accountability for that to happen. Because of that, it means not only the component makers, but also, the system integrators.
Often, they’re just integrating components manufactured elsewhere, like the semiconductor probably from Taiwan, as well as Japan, US, and other nearby jurisdictions. They always do a package, a system integration work, when working on the Belt and Road Initiative, and maybe install some extra software or hardware on it.
What we are seeing is that we’re now partnering with the likes of OPIC, JPIC, or other foreign aid arms from other jurisdictions to build what we call a non-red stack that will provide the same telecommunications service, but not from any components made by the PRC.
Just to back up a little bit, are the mobile operators in Taiwan private corporations or government? Just because you’re saying that these Chinese components, these PRC components, can’t be used because of the law that was passed.
If it’s a private mobile operator, can’t they use whatever private component they want from China, Europe, or whatever, or is the law only applicable to government procurement? That’s what I heard, and I would love to get some clarification on that.
There’s two different regulations in play here. The one that I mentioned that was established about five years ago was around network infrastructure. That will, as part of its function, track each and every phone’s location, even the tilt, the angle where you hold it, the movement, a lot of other things.
It has much more power to, for example, forge an SMS from anyone to nearby communication towers, and so on. That is the critical infrastructure within telecommunication. We’ve banned PRC components in it since five years ago.
There’s no question about it. The reasons, as I said, is that there is no real “private company” on the PRC origin. They can become state-owned, or de fact state-controlled, overnight, at any point in time. For the government procurement thing, that then applies to the peripheral devices, such as mobile phones, drones, all those IoT devices, and so on.
What we’re saying is that it has to pass a certification to be cyber security safe. It does not only apply to PRC. It applies to any foreign – well, even domestic – components for the government systems to use, as well as the critical infrastructures, such as the electric grid, the TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Company.
It’s within the industrial park, and industrial parks in considered critical in Taiwan. All these components, they have a more extended blacklist and whitelist. Outside of those, if you just decide to buy a personal phone as a private citizen, really, there isn’t much damage that your phone can do.
Right now, the United States is trying to convince a lot of other countries not to allow Huawei to be part of any 5G build-out. You’re telling me that Taiwan made a decision quite a number of years ago already.
A lot of countries seem worried about cutting Chinese-made components and companies out because of blowback. It looks like Taiwan did it. Was there blowback from the PRC when you guys passed this regulation?
No, but PRC is not claiming any other country as its territory either. It’s a different political situation, anyway. It’s very understandable for Taiwan to take such a measure, because whenever there’s an escalation, there’s a lot of incentive to make a private company de facto state-controlled.
Where the risk analysis will probably be different if you are physically far away from Beijing. I would not say that all our factors come into play when other territories and jurisdictions are doing that analysis.
I would say that path dependence is real. When they give out 3G for free, they’re essentially subsidizing it by the state to create a path dependence on 4G and 5G.
Let’s talk a little bit about the economy, the economic relationship, which I actually talked about at the Oslo Freedom Forum yesterday, the close trade ties that Taiwan has with the PRC, China, Beijing.
What are the challenges of managing that relationship in terms of China’s overwhelming economic power and leverage over any country, but especially for a country – or an island, depending on your point of view – and its leverage politically and economically? How do you manage that when you’re a small country?
That’s why I keep saying “jurisdiction”… Even though it’s a longer word, it’s not disputed by anyone.
Yes, trade relationships is very important to Taiwan, since we rely heavily on not just import-export, but also innovations on science, technologies, and things like that.
Because of that, there is a very diverse selection of partners. You might have heard of our so-called New Southbound Policy. Traditionally, we have good relationship with the, for example, Korean and Japanese markets.
We’re also now expanding very broadly into the Indo-Pacific as well. The reason why is that, I think in Taiwan, it used to be that our semiconductors is world famous. Our OEM-ODM – that is to say, the hardware manufacturing part, as well as a very quick prototype services, and so on – is just world famous.
Now, we’re moving gradually up on the value chain. We’re now much more famous now for, for example, AIoT, which is assistive intelligence on Internet of things. For example, a smart water pollution detection network, a smart air pollution detection network, a trustworthy distributed ledger, also known as blockchain, applied to the civil IoT.
That includes disaster prevention, earthquake protection, and so on. When we move up the value chain, it makes much more applicable to solve the global goals, the global questions that we’re facing now. For example, on the climate change issue, we have made a lot of use of machine learning to effectively distribute clean water and also, reduce the leak of the pipes, and so on.
Many island jurisdictions, such as New Zealand, traditionally did not have that problem of water shortage. Because of climate change, they’re having to adapt now. We co-create such technologies with those jurisdictions.
What I’m pointing at is that we’re not only selling hardware components or hardware designs anymore. We’re more a co-creation partner than anything before. Because of that, we have diversified our trade relationship.
Just thinking back to the Oslo Freedom Forum yesterday and the discussion about the export of authoritarianism, do you think the PRC, China, is exporting authoritarianism through its sales of surveillance technology, digital technology to other countries?
They’re certainly making it easier, but there’s two sides of this. On one hand, they make it easier to deploy a state surveillance, social credit, as well as other kinds of systems, but it must be built also on a political system that allows this to happen, or even encourage this to happen.
That is to say, if a country is already democratized, it’s far less likely for them to accept this kind of technology, because the promise of “harmonization of the society” is not perceived as a true social value in democratized countries. I would say that their audience is limited, if it’s technology alone.
When PRC companies, Chinese companies, export things related to technology, whether it’s hardware or software, and goes to a democratic state, they’re talking a lot these days about smart cities. I asked a leading question, is China exporting authoritarianism through its tech exports?
Are there positives and benefits to the technology it’s exporting, and can it be applied to smart cities in a positive way? Do you see that happening in more democratic states that purchase from China?
No, I think democratic states would like smart citizens. That’s just a fact. The plurality of voices, and a, what we call social innovation, meaning innovation informed, decided by the social sector, for the public good, rather than decided by the mayor themselves, is the kind of innovation that the citizens want from a “smart city initiative.”
It took a while for people to figure this out, but most “smart city initiatives” without empowering citizens fail, exactly because the next mayor may have a different vision. Also, technologies become outdated very quickly if the society is asked to comply, instead of co-create the technology in the first place.
In Taiwan, the air quality sensors that is actually hanging right out there outside my office is created by citizens. It’s open source and open hardware. Any junior high school student can change it, if they learn a little bit of open hardware, like Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
Because of that, it stays relevant as technologies change, as people’s behavior patterns change, as people expect more to be measured, like PM2.5, or things like that. If you deploy in a top-down way, there is no way for people to join the co-creation.
In a few years, they become obsolete, so the city become dumber, the citizens not at all smarter.
What about Taiwan is most vulnerable to Chinese influence?
I would say that we’re not particularly vulnerable on any front. There are, I think, people who are in Taiwan who still sympathize with authoritarianism. Not too long ago, we were under martial law.
I still remember [laughs] the days under the martial law. For people who are younger than me, though, they don’t remember that anymore. They were born into the freedom of the press, of assembly, of association, all those basic fundamental freedoms.
Also, to personal computers and the Internet. Democracy and Internet, it’s the same thing, because they happened in the same year in Taiwan. People who live in a, what we call digital natives, are naturally democratized, and to an extent, even creating democracy.
We’re really the first generation that can create democratic institutions. People who were born before me, they were used to, lived within the authoritarian government. Or even a generation older, a dictatorship.
Because of that, they evolved a certain worldview that takes time to heal and takes time to make peace with the younger generations. I think it’s not so much a vulnerability from PRC, but because the vulnerability from authoritarianism that people still sometimes identify it.
I think that will become less of a problem if we continue our path toward democracy for another decade or so.
There’s been a lot of talk, whenever you come to Taiwan, and you talk to politicians. They talk about the influence campaign from China, and it’s a huge concern to them. Do you think it’s legitimate? Do you think they’re overplaying it?
It sounds like you’re much…You’re one of the more confident people I’ve spoken to about the viability and strength of Taiwanese democracy. I would love to hear your thoughts on this influence campaign, both the online social media influence, and in all the other respects that people like to talk about here.
I can see people worried because of the previous election, which happened to be the same day as the referenda.
Although we, of course, would like to be like Switzerland, where each referendum item is sufficiently deliberated for a year or so, the simple truth is that, even if you have deliberated for a year, if you have a referendum on the same day as the election, people are going to think in binary terms, no matter how much deliberation has been done before.
By nature, it’s a partisan day. I’m a nonpartisan and also post-gender, and so I don’t over-identify with any particular sides. Rather, I take all the sides. Because of that, I can see that there were clearly influence campaigns that used the divisive points that are already naturally occurring whenever there is a referendum and took an opportunistic approach to sow discord.
They are turning misinformation – that’s just the people who were just misinformed – to disinformation. That is to say, paid precision fake accounts, targeted advertisements that tries to paint the other side as an “other.”
We learned from it, and we now run referendum on alternating years. It’s presidential election, the next year with a referendum, and then mayor election, and then referendum, and so on, and so forth. That is to say, representative democracy and direct democracy take on alternating years, allowing more time for reflection and deliberation.
I think that was the main design flaw in the previous election that creates opportunities. This time, it’s not so much opportunities now. We are also adopting a set of approaches that makes the campaign transparency apply also to the social media campaigns.
That was the last election, but what about this upcoming one, which is a little complicated to talk about? By the time this podcast series is published, the election would have already taken place.
From what I understand, there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation, what people call fake news, floating out there, benefiting one party or the other right now in this presidential election cycle. What do you think about that? Is the threat still there, and how serious is it, if you can contextualize that?
I don’t want you using the F-word. I don’t use the F-word to describe news. That is because in Mandarin here, both news and journalism translates to the same word, 新聞. News is 新聞, and a journalist is a 新聞工作.
When you say the F-word, it sounds like actually an affront to journalists. It’s a word that I cannot use out of filial piety, because both my parents were journalists, just for the record. Moving on.
I should say, I don’t ever use the fake news, because news, by its very nature and definition, is not fake. I don’t use it on my social media or Twitter, but I have to use it in the way we have conversations.
It’s what people seem to understand. Unfortunately, it has developed a life of its own, but yes, I hear you, totally.
You can just say propaganda. It also works. You were asking about misleading propaganda or disinformation in the, by the time you hear this, already-concluded election. Without a time machine, I really could not outline how it developed from now, which is only September.
We can already see some trends. First of all, that people are becoming much more aware that there are information manipulations going on. People are asking much more about who and where the source of the information comes from.
The new curriculum, which took place just this month, rolls the media literacy, along with critical and creative thinking technologies, into one of its core nine curriculum agenda, its core competencies for all children, starting from the primary grade, to learn.
I expect, by the election day, we will see much more people starting asking the source of such information. The difference also is that we have built quite a robust fact-checking network, based on the standard established by the International Fact-Checking Network, but also, by a voluntary counter-disinformation agreement, signed on by Facebook, Google, Line, PTT, you name it.
So that they enroll not only media literacy education, but also, in clearly labeling the paid political advertisement. Also, assist us in banning foreign-sponsored funding that goes into such precision targeting, as can be seen a lot in the previous election and so on.
I predict that, if the election has disinformation, it has to take a very different form, compared to a previous election.
What thoughts and advice do you have for any government that is doing business with China?
“Any government” is too broad. It totally depends on how much it already depends on the trade with PRC.
It is very broad. That was a bad question, I admit. Let’s go back to the Silk and Road Initiative, I suppose. How should governments and corporations think about business deals done by and presented by the Silk and Road Initiative?
What are your thoughts about it? You might not have anything. It might be a little bit tangential to all the issues that you do deal with.
My only concern with that initiative is that I’m not against infrastructure work. I’m just saying that, do a systemic risk analysis. It’s not the risk created by any specific components, but rather by the debt structure, by the structure of deployment, by the intertwining of the political and economic agenda, and all that.
Consider all the different aspects of any particular offer, not only on its technological fronts, or on its price, because it’s essentially state-subsidized. Many people are wakening to that fact now. I would just say do a full-fledged systemic risk analysis and make your own choice.
I think this is my last question. There is a presidential candidate, the owner of Foxconn, essentially. There was a lot of concern about the fact that a businessman with so many economic interests in the mainland would be a compromised candidate.
I think, in many ways, this was an example of the greater relationship between Taiwan and China. I think this is the start of our conversation, looking at how do you manage the relationship between Taiwan and China, when there are such close economic ties?
I guess I want to go back and end the conversation by thinking a little bit more about that. You had seemed very confident that there isn’t that much vulnerability in Taiwan.
Do you think the narrative, then, in a lot of media coverage, especially in the English language, media coverage about Taiwan and China’s relationship, the vulnerability of Taiwan, and people pointing out the strong economic connections between the two being an issue for Taiwan to manage, is that narrative wrong?
First of all, authoritarianism is, by its nature, more vulnerable, because it’s at odds with their people’s will. It’s this simple. That’s why the PRC has to spend more on “international domestic harmonization” than “defense.”
Because of that, I do think that democracies are resilient. Democracies are resilient to a degree that the government is transparent and accountable. If the government makes the policymaking not only understandable, but actually funny, for people to participate.
To make democracy something that people not only care about, but rather, enjoy participating. In Taiwan, we make a lot of those democratic innovation that only require 15 minutes of engagement. Then you participate in agenda setting.
Then people feel much more closer to the polity and the policies. When you reach that point, there’s really not much that an information operation can do, because people feel that they are part of the agenda-making themselves.
That’s why I’m more optimistic. That is predicated on two things. First, in Taiwan, we have broadband as human right. No matter if you are on the peak of the Yu Shan Mountain or the Pacific island of Dongshan, you have 10 Megabits per second. If you don’t, it’s my fault.
I think it’s 98 percent of population now. In any case, what I’m trying to drive at is that, all this real-time clarification, all this open government work, relies on the fact that people can see our communications, our live streams, very clearly, and my facial expressions to a very high definition.
When people are used to that environment where they can just have a live stream, or even just a town hall meeting virtually – with 5G, even in VR. You can overlap a few town halls together – then it creates an internal confidence of democracy.
In other jurisdictions where the broadband as human right is not yet complete, but nevertheless democratic, it does run the vulnerability of people used to low definition video feeds and so on, which is very easy to run deep fakes or some other algorithm on to pretend to have a real conversation while it’s actually an acted-out character, motion captured, or things like that.
We have seen that kind of thing happening everywhere in the world, even in democracies, fact-checking become weaponized, and things like that. I am not pretending that being a democracy automatically makes you resilient.
I’m just saying that we’ve very intentionally made our democracy resilient by investing five to seven percent of each government project just on relationship with white hat hackers, inviting top cyber security experts to attack our government systems, on preparing and proactively defending our security perimeters, and things like that.
It’s based on this understanding that I think it’s less of a vulnerability. I’m not saying that democracy is invulnerable by itself. That would be hallucination. For your next part of the question, I think the narrative is not wrong, but I think it’s more fair to paint Taiwan as not something that’s defined by our relationship with PRC alone.
As I mentioned, the east part of Taiwan share the same Austronesian culture with the Polynesians. They came from Taiwan. The language are still compatible to a degree, all the way to the Maori. All this means that we’re a multicultural, multi-ethnicity society now.
We build as much bilateral cultural relationship with those different Indo-Pacific cultures as we share with the PRC. I think that is the narrative that we’re sharing with the world, that Taiwan can help, no matter which global goal you’re working toward. You don’t have to be speaking Mandarin for us to work together.
Minister Tang, thank you very much.
Thank you.