I’m based in Tokyo. I’m the correspondent for “Le Figaro,” and I write sometimes for “Toyo Keizai.” I proposed to the Le Figaro your profile. I was very interested because I’m in Japan and everybody’s talking about you. [laughs] It’s a bit weird.
Since then I tried to read about Taiwan’s response, which is very impressive, especially for French people, because, as you know, the COVID has been very harsh on us. There are many issues that are discussed in France now that you, Taiwan, tackled. For example, privacy and digital.
That’s right.
I tried to organize the interview in several themes. First, maybe I will ask you a bit personal question. Do you remember the SARS outbreak? How did you react to it?
Yes, I remember. Everybody above 30 years old remembers. We remember the chaos. How the municipal government and the central government give different messages.
How the entire hospital need to barricaded, unannounced, with no definite termination date. Basically, everybody in there was very unsure about their fate. There was massive panic buying of N95 mask, and many other things.
We remember it as a traumatic and chaotic time. 37 people died. We decided it’s 37 people too many.
When you heard about the COVID, is there some models or some answers that you had in mind in front of such a crisis?
Definitely, because we spent the post-SARS days designing what we will do when SARS happens again so we will be more prepared. This includes the medical personnel, the negative pressure wards, the annual drills, and so on, but also the regulatory adjustments that we have to make.
The Central Epidemic Command Center, which was not there during SARS, was designed into existence. The daily press briefings. The ideas that all the ministries, regardless of their position and their ministerial, work in the Central Epidemic Command Center.
Instead of asking the CECC people to come to them, this ideas of almost science-based single command chain that makes sure the municipal and the central government is on the same page, almost by design.
Also, the Constitutional Court debate of whether it was constitutional to barricade the entire hospital in the first place. The Constitutional Court said it was constitutional, but it was very ill advised to do it in such a way, without preannouncement, without people understanding what it’s about, and so on.
They tell the legislators to make much more clear the Act on Communicable Diseases, the CDA, which spells out exactly what needs to be done. Also, authorizing the administration to seek alternative to barricading and isolating people.
For example, the digital fence, which is the idea of using the cell phone tower triangulation to make sure that people who are within the 50-meter radius of home isolation or home quarantine, they can notify the local household manager or police when that phone breaks out of that radius, while preserving some privacy, because it’s not GPS or other fine-grained tracking.
It goes out after the 14 days of quarantine. That’s narrow, deep, but we can prove it’s necessary and, also, always better than barricading entire hospital.
Measures are also designed on the post-SARS days. When we noticed Dr. Li Wenliang’s whistleblowing last December we immediately assumed it’s the SARS coming over again. We started health inspections for people flying from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day. That’s the first day of this year.
Sorry. Why is barricading hospital a problem? Can you tell me about that?
The persons within the hospital was not notified that they’re going to be quarantined. A emergency measure.
The people in there did not have adequate mental or physical preparation. They were barred from leaving for a indefinite period of time, and so it was very traumatic for everybody involved.
What’s really striking to me in your response is the collaboration between entities that don’t talk to each other. In the case of the mask, from what I read, it’s a pharmacist, Google, and the government who work in sync.
This seems very hard to manage, this coordination, this dance. How do you do that?
We do it by radical transparency. That is to say, we make sure not only we publish the information as in other freedom of information jurisdictions.
If you ask for a copy of the pharmacy’s stock levels you eventually get one. You maybe get a weekly update or a daily update. That’s what is the norm in other countries.
In Taiwan the pharmacists publish their stock levels at that time every 30 seconds, which brings to a very different way of governance, because if it’s updated every 30 seconds it’s almost like a distributed ledger. It’s like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Everybody can add third-party developments on top of this stream of real-time supply and demand data.
Not only the Google developers in Tainan built a map that shows you where the nearby pharmacies are that still have mask in stock. It can help you to navigate there.
Also, the chatbots. For example, the Center of Disease Control has a chatbot on the LINE platform, which is like WhatsApp. That is popular here. You can also, using interactive chatbots, interface, understand where your nearby pharmacies are.
There’s even a policy analysis dashboard that predicts the supply numbers in the municipalities in rural areas down to precinct and district level so that we can adjust our supply based on those evidence policymaking tools built by the civil society. I built a compilation website, mask.pdis.nat.gov.tw, that now lists more than 140 of those civil society contributions to make sense of those shared numbers.
First, the rapid iteration of the system. When the pharmacist give us feedback we implement it right away on the stock level system. That’s the first thing, is a rapid iteration of the system itself.
Also, the trust that the government places on the civil society and the private sector for not misusing those numbers. We relinquished all the copyright claims. All you have to do is to attribute the original source, URL, but otherwise you’re free to do anything. That’s opened up this gate for open innovation ecosystem.
You know there’s a big topic in France about privacy in digital world. To me it seems very overblown because I can’t find any real damage to privacy. We had the same debate about camera, about video surveillance in France 20 years ago.
Do you think these issues are overblown outside of Taiwan? Do you think they are real issues? How do you cope with them?
First of all, mask stock level has nothing to do with privacy, period. [laughs] We make sure that when we publish data, as we collect it we ensure it comes from sources that are not personally identifiable, anyway. This is orthogonal to the topic you’re discussing.
We do think that, for example, if people are feeling that once they go into the home quarantine or home isolation they will be labeled and tracked after they finish the 14-day quarantining period, that is a problem, but it’s not because of technology. It is because of the social labeling or the other antisocial norms in the society.
The CECC takes great care to not publish personally identifiable information for people who are confirmed cases in quarantine precisely because we want to avoid the kind of labeling effect.
Again, this is not about technology. This is about ensuring that people will want to go to a local clinic wearing a mask if they develop symptoms. If they see that other people get personally identified, become a outcast of their community, and labeled, then once they develop symptoms they will not be incentivized to show up knowing that they will get a fair treatment.
This is about social incentive design. It’s not privacy for privacy’s sake, but rather protecting their privacy because we want more people to show up to clinics if they do develop symptoms.
I still think this is important, but not on a ideological sense.
What’s very impressive to me, I went to Taiwan a couple of times. I visited in Kaohsiung, the ACER factory, and so forth. What’s impressive to me, I was thinking about that because there is a real collaboration between the old economy and new economy.
In France we don’t do mask. The very few manufacturing industries we have are in luxury. Louis Vuitton makes masks, alcohol gel.
In Taiwan you have this industrial base still. Do you agree that this old economy base was involved?
Many of the teams producing mask was not producing mask before the pandemic. They were doing smart machinery. They’re even doing aeronautic engineering. [laughs] A far higher position than mask production.
It’s out of a sense of common purpose and saving the country they drop everything else that they do and voluntarily modernized and scaled up the mask production system. I don’t think it is particular in Taiwan that we produced so many masks. This is about a sense of mobilization.
If the private sector can act in unison, in a sense of common purpose, and if the government can be trusting of the private sector contributors to honor the nationalized mask economy until we have a steady supply of 15 million mask a day, the rest of them can be bought and sold.
Actually, people who have plenty of mask in store in their own home even dedicated their uncollected mask quota to international community in need. There’s millions of mask that’s dedicated this way, which shows great altruism.
What I’m trying to get at is that everybody is in this together. That is the real power of the civil society mobilization, in that if there’s a private sector company who is capable of providing machinery but they want to produce something more lucrative, then their shareholders, their families, and so on will all apply societal pressure to the decision maker of that company so that they have no other choice but work with what the society think is more important.
For example, the Taiwan Liquor Company also dropped one of their most lucrative lines of liquor and produced 75 percent alcohol for hand sprays. You see it around Taiwan in all the different sectors, not just for mask production.
Did you find that your approach can be exportable to other countries? On top of that, when you look at Singapore or Hong Kong, what are the things you did differently from them?
Many aspects of our ideas can be exported. For example, for putting an end to conspiracy theories and panic buying we have developed the idea of humor over rumor.
Of our Premier showing up in very humorous Internet memes, wiggling his buttocks, saying, “We only have one buttock each, so there’s no need to panic buy tissue papers. By the way, the material came from South America, and the mask material is domestic, so even though we’re ramping up the mask production by tenfold, it will not damage the supply of tissue papers.”
That successfully cleared away the conspiracy theories and panic buying in a matter of days.
You hired comedians to display that message?
Yes, professional comedians, and it’s shared on the Premier’s own social media feed. It’s hilarious.
Every day in the CECC press conference the important new scientific messages are translated into Doggo language. It’s a very cute spokesdog of CECC. Literally, the dog that lives with the participation officer, the PO, of the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
All they have to do is to go back home, take a photo of the dog, and show through dog gesture, dog sign language how to keep social distance. If you’re indoor, it’s three dog. If you’re outdoor, it’s two dogs between you.
It’s very easy to remember. Once this communication goes out it dwarf the disinformation, the conspiracy theories, and the rumors.
That’s something that everybody can learn from Taiwan. That’s one thing.
The other thing is how we built a culture where even a few people in a large crowd can remind other people to start wearing mask by saying, “Masks are here to protect your own health. To remind you to wash your hands properly and not to touch your face.”
If we see it this way, then a few people in a large crowd can say, “Oh, the other people, you probably need to take care of yourself. Why don’t you put a mask on?”
While altruistic ideas like putting on a mask to protect from each other doesn’t easily fly if there’s only a few people in a large crowd trying to say, “Oh, you need to protect us and respect us.” That probably doesn’t work as well as appealing to selfish interest incentive design that we have communicated.
There’s many more. These things, those ideas are like nuggets that can easily be shared across jurisdictions.
The main difference comparing Taiwan to Hong Kong and Singapore was that the government worked in a way that amplified the best ideas from the society. That is to say, the social innovators drive the counter-pandemic protocol, whereas in Hong Kong there’s perhaps not as much trust to its people from the government.
The idea of everybody in the CECC starting to wear pink medical mask was prompted by someone calling 1922 hotline and says there’s a young boy. They don’t want to go to school because all they have in their household is pink medical mask and he will get laughed at by his classmates.
Instead of sending some blue mask to the boy, everybody in the CECC, even though many of them are male, started wearing pink medical mask and teach the idea of gender mainstreaming.
When there’s a professor, Lai Chane-yu, that discovered that medical masks can be disinfected very easily using a traditional rice cooker, then the CECC commander cooked the mask in front of the live press conference while the professor explained that we give out as award to the coronavirus hackathon to co-hack this small rice cooker that can be used to disinfect the mask.
You don’t see those life hacks being shared by other jurisdictions’ Central Epidemic Central Command, but this is a large co-learning process that everybody is in together. We serve as amplifiers of the social ideas.
It’s great because it brings me to the topic of democracy in Taiwan. I remember my first night in Taiwan. I had dinner with a politician. It was a woman. She was 50.
She spoke good English. She said, “The Chinese will never crush…” I remember her and the way she pronounced them. She was using “crush, crush.” She said, “Will never crush Taiwan’thirst for freedom,” or something.
You never see such a scene in Japan or wherever. Maybe it comes from the fact that democracy in Taiwan came from a fight. It was not a given, like for Japan.
I’ve been in Japan 20 years. I have the sense that because democracy was given in Japan – it was imposed, actually. It was a imposed freedom – people don’t cherish it as much as in your country, which is small, and next to China, hence more in constant jeopardy.
Do you agree that there is value in the acquisition of freedom by fight?
I agree that because we all remember the martial law, at least for people who are over 35 years old, they remember some sort of bad old days where there was no freedom of press, there was no freedom of assembly, and people gradually fought to bring democracy around.
We do not want to go back to the bad old days. That is why when we see, for example, in PRC in the recent years they’re going back to what we remember as the martial law days, where there’s no freedom to criticize the government and the journalistic freedom is massively hampered, we see it not only in the sense of not want to go there.
Also, we see the danger of not having a journalism sector. It makes even the decision makers unaware of what’s really happening in the field. That leads to very bad decisions, even by the most good-hearted decision makers.
We see it as a structural problem that we have overcome. We want to make sure that we share this message to all the jurisdictions who are thinking maybe they have to go a little bit authoritarian because of pandemic.
The Taiwan model is saying, no, you don’t have to do that. We’ve never declared a state of emergency. We’ve never locked down anything. We didn’t close any schools, and most businesses remain open. Still, you can have a good, resilient pandemic response if you mobilize the civil society and the power of democracy.
It’s maybe a naïve question, but do you think the small size of Taiwan helps in having a democracy with such direct relationship between government and its citizens? Because Israel is also a democracy.
There is, for me, a premium now for small countries. It used to be that big is beautiful and you need to be big, but now you have so many small countries in size that are doing much better than big countries. You’re better off in Switzerland than in India…
Do you think the size is helpful, or do you think it’s not?
With 23 million people Taiwan is packed on a few islands. The population density should make the pandemic much worse on a epidemiology viewpoint.
I would say while the Taiwan High Speed Rails and broadband as human right has brought people together, and people can much more easily empathize with one another because it’s easier to travel and share their personal stories and histories, what we call our transculturalism, meaning that we respect and foster all the more than 20 national languages and communities.
It’s usually a good idea when developing democracy that people can easily empathize with one another. That I’d agree, but on pandemic the population density is a much higher risk factor than pretty much everything else combined.
We had to make sure that more than 90 percent of people have a easy supply mask they can get for less than two US dollars. Every two weeks 9 medical mask if they’re adult and 10 if you’re a child. That rebuilds the physical vaccination that is needed in a population with such a high population density.
I’m, right after this conversation, going to collect my nine masks, like every two weeks, in the nearby convenience store.
Apparently you are a frequent visitor of Japan. Japan, to me, is a bit sad because it’s going a bit down. Japan used to be the tunnel to Asia of democracy and technology. I feel that, frankly speaking, Taiwan or Korea are, now, more having this role.
What is your impression of Japan?
I work with the Code for Japan, which is — like g0v — a civic technology community. I think they’re very vibrant, especially their connection to the original revitalization strategies.
In a sense of intergenerational solidarity, I still think we can learn a lot with Japan because they managed to have a very active public participation by the elderly people.
On the other hand, when it comes to the online part and the participation of very young people it is true that Taiwan is much more vibrant when you look at the rates of people who go to vote or people who participate in online petitions, referenda, and so on. Especially around the people who are around 20 years old, definitely we are much more active.
There is something to be learned from both cultures. We need to also encourage our elderly, like Japanese elderly, to take part more in community affairs and in community building and revitalization of their local economy, but we can also share with Japanese young people how to participate in day-to-day democracy, not just the once every four year voting.
Can you explain to me again what you said about telling people in a crowd to wear a mask? Do you mean the people next to each other?
Yes. We had this norm of if you cannot keep one and a half meter from each other if you are indoor you need to wear a mask, but if people violate this social norm there need to be a way for people around them to gently remind them.
The standard reminder is, “This is a packed place. Why are you not taking care of your own health?” That is the standard reminder.
That is because the medical mask is billed as something that protects the person who wears it. If I put on the mask I am saying that I am not going to touch my face, I’m going to wash my hands properly, and it guards me from the coronavirus pandemic.
If it’s billed this way, then a few people wearing the mask can signal to a much larger majority of people who are not yet wearing a mask that they, too, need to put their mask on because it’s in their best interest.
Whereas in other jurisdictions if you bill mask as something that protect each other, like respect each other, which is great, but that social pressure only works if you have a majority of people in that room wearing mask.
When you say you should wear a mask for your own sake is it something you say to each other, or is it just a general principle?
I get that said to me all the time. If I forgot to put on a mask in a convenience store, or even if I temporarily take it off to take a photo or something, people remind me, and not only to my face, but also on the Internet, like, “Minister, you need to protect your own health. Please put on a mask.”
What you mean to say is that it’s not seen as rude. If someone in the drugstore comes to me and say, “You should wear your mask for your own sake,” you mean they say it in a way that is not intrusive and aggressive? Is that what you mean?
That’s right, because they’re reminding you that this is a place with a high population density. Perhaps it’s not possible to keep a social distance.
This is like saying, “It’s raining. Why don’t you bring out your umbrella?” or “The pollution level is high today. Why don’t you out on your mask?” This is something that people already do to one another. It’s a friendly reminder to take care of your own health.
In Taiwan there is no debate about efficiency of masks?
As I said, a mask reminds you to not touch your face and it reminds you to wash your hands properly. I don’t think these things are debatable. These are facts.
There is not debate about masks preventing the spread? There is not such a debate? Because in France there is a big debate. Or in Singapore they used not to wear masks. Now they do wear masks.
Many French people refuse to wear masks saying, “No, it’s just not proven scientifically that it blocks the virus.” It’s very strange because it’s a debate on the very basic…It’s not even a technology. It’s like a tissue. It’s very weird to have such a debate, even today.
As you can see, if the idea is to apply social pressure so that people wear the mask is assumed as potentially sick, so they have to wear a mask to protect others, then they will say, “Oh, the mask may not be useful for that,” or whatever, because it’s seen as a tension between their personal freedom to not wear a mask and the public health.
The Taiwan idea of incentive design sidesteps this question. It doesn’t matter whether the person believe the mask will protect others or not because we say the mask is something that prevents you from touching your mouth, and that’s something that reminds you to wash your hand.
These things are not up to debate. These things are facts.
Thank you so much. It was really interesting. Does this video that you are recording…?
You can download right from our Skype chat after a couple minutes. It depends on how you want to use it. If you want to publish it let me know.
Just for me for my record and translate.
We can also make a transcript, and I’ll send the transcript to you, so we publish only the transcript and only after you edit it.
In English? Please do that. It will be really great.
Thank you.
I hope to see you in Tokyo some day.
See you. Cheers. Bye. Take care.