Let me introduce. I’m Kiyoko. Then we have Yoshi, NHK WORLD anchor.

Hello.

Hello. Greetings.

Nice to meet you.

Our conversation will be in English, right?

Right.

Yes. Thank you.

It will be broadcast also in NPR, National Public Radio, in the US, so all this in English.

Let’s get started.

First of all, can I just quickly check your sound quality? Maybe Yoshi can start question one. I’ll start recording and see if the level is OK.

Let me know. I’ll switch to my USB recorder. The voice quality will hopefully be better, a good quality local recording.

Oh, local. So usually, they use your local recording when they broadcast it.

Yes, because this is guaranteed to be of the best quality. So that we can speak freely and you can make sure that it has all the sound that you need.

I think the quality I get is fine. We can maybe start from the beginning. We’ll just do the recording. Yo-san, are you OK with it?

Sure.

I’m going to turn off my camera so maybe we get better sound quality. Whenever you’re ready. Are you ready, Minister Tang?

Yes, of course.

Thank you.

We should turn off our cameras too?

Do you prefer to have your camera on or off?

Our current connection quality… Let me switch my camera off.

When you are ready, we’re going to start recording. We start from the intro.

Start from the intro…

I am ready. Let’s get started.

You’re listening to “Asian View” on NHK WORLD-JAPAN. Taiwan has been remarkably successful in containing the COVID-19 outbreak. Authorities say there have been only deaths so far in a population of 23 million and there had been no local transmission for over eight months.

Joining us on the line is Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. She’s playing a key role in the fight against COVID-19. Minister Tang, thank you very much for your time.

Hello. Good local time, everyone.

What Taiwan has achieved is incredible. Can you explain how digitalization helped contain the outbreak in Taiwan?

The main technology that helped the outbreak to be contained in Taiwan is mask and washing your hands with soap. Digital technology play assistive role next to the physical vaccine of masks and the chemical technology of soap and hand sanitizers.

Our digital pillars are fast, fair, and fun. The fast part makes sure that anyone who want to learn anything about epidemiology can call a toll-free number, 1922. There also chat bot and online ask scientist forums so that people can get the right information, in the right time, in their preferred way.

The fair part makes sure that everyone with a national single-payer health insurance can take their IC card to nearby pharmacies or convenience stores and get the ration of the masks. We are now entering 10 masks per two weeks for adults and children alike.

Finally, the fun part is a very cute spokesdog. The name is Zongchai, a Shiba Inu that reminds you to wear a mask to protect against your own unwashed hand or keep a physical distance of three Shiba Inus indoors or two dogs outdoors.

In terms of the masks, you made a mask map. That’s an app that was created by a volunteer. You took the idea and developed a government mask distribution app. What can we learn from this?

There are more than 140 different mask map and applications. When the first one appeared in early February, indeed I took Howard Wu’s version and spoke to the head of the cabinet, saying currently we update the mask availability every day, but that will make the people not trusting the government or each other indeed that easily because only the government has the capacity to audit.

On the other hand, if we publish every three minutes or even every 30 seconds, then everyone queuing in line can confirm for themselves that a person queuing before them have indeed purchased the allotted ration of masks.

This has two benefit. One is that people trust each other more because they can see before their eyes that this is actually affecting the availability for the pharmacy. They will call 1922 if anything goes wrong.

Second, the government doesn’t have to cater to all the needs of people speaking different languages, people who don’t see the maps that easily with seeing difficulties. The people can develop voice assistance, chat bots, dashboards, all the different ways to make sure that the data is transparent and accountable.

What about in terms of monitoring people that have to stay in quarantine? What sort of digital technology is being used in that?

The heuristic that we use, the rule of thumb, is that we must not set up new data collection points in the name of pandemic that wasn’t there before the pandemic because we’re a democratic country. Because of that and also because we’ve never declared a state of emergency, we need to work with existing data collection.

Our digital quarantine method is very simple. If people choose to stay in their own place with their own bathroom for 14 days upon returning to Taiwan, they are required to let us know their mobile phone number.

Using that phone number, the telecoms operators already measure the signal strength of the relative three telecom towers to that phone. By a method that we call triangulation, they know up to maybe 50 meter radius degree, a very coarse, not GPS precision. They know that whether you’ve escaped the block or not.

If you do, they send an SMS automatically to the local medical officers, who will check your whereabouts. If you indeed have broken the quarantine, then you’re fined up to US$33K.

Wow. A very strict penalty, but it’s made possible by only using existing technology.

That’s exactly right. If you do stay in the quarantine for 14 days, then we pay you US$33 per day as a stipend thanking you for your work.

What are some other reasons for Taiwan’s success in containing the outbreak?

The main reason really is that people over 30 years old remember SARS 1.0 in 2003, where we had very chaotic communication. The municipal government was saying different things from the central one. We had to lock down an entire hospital unannounced for a indefinite number of days and so on.

It’s exactly like the situation in other jurisdictions now. We had a societal inoculation. We had a collective memory of how bad the lockdowns was. This time, we need to fight the pandemic with no lockdown, just as we fight the infodemic with no takedown.

Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the world in 2021?

With the hindsight of 2020, we really need to make not only the vaccine distribution system fair and equitable but also protect ourselves against new release of the SARS virus. Currently, we’re on SARS 2.1. It’s already mutated once.

Maybe some people in the UK are experiencing SARS 2.2. There’s no telling when SARS 3.0 will be released. Maybe next year, maybe 10 years from now. I don’t know.

I’m sorry. You referred to the 2003 as SARS 1.0…

1.0.

…and COVID-19 as SARS 2.0.

2.0, but it’s mutated once already, so it’s 2.1.

Right.

What we are seeing now is that because the vaccine developers have a great technology that can upgrade the virus code, quite literally, whenever there’s a new release of SARS, a new mutation of the SARS strain, so the vaccines could be updated in real-time.

If it mutates beyond the capacity of the current vaccine-maker’s technology, like if it’s not 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, but rather 3.1, then we have to restart the vaccine verification process. We need to prepare for this scenario through a global effort.

So what Taiwan went through in 2003, the world is going through now, and we need to learn from what’s going on now to prepare for the next one.

That’s exactly right, but no matter how many mutations SARS go through, it’s still transmit through your face and your hands. Wear a mask, which I refer to as physical vaccine, to protect against your own hands. That always works.

Minister Tang, you advocate what you call digital democracy. Can you briefly explain what that is and how it works?

Certainly. This is everyone’s business with everyone’s help. The government doesn’t only work for the people They must work with the people.

The mask map participatory auditing system is a great example because people do not have to take the national health insurance agency’s words or numbers. They can verify, through their own queuing or their pre-ordering or through the convenience store systems, that it really is a equitable access.

This is not just about transparency. It’s also about participation. There’s a member of the parliament, Kao Hung-an, who was the VP of Data Analytics at the Foxconn Group, so she knows something about data.

She took the numbers, analyzed it, and interpolated Minister Chen Shih-chung of Health and Welfare saying, “It may look fair on the map, but that’s only if you measure the physical distance. If you measure through the time, through public transportation, in the rural areas, it’s actually not fair.”

That kind of feedback is exactly what we need as a democracy, where everyone can think about the data through their own perspective. Then Minister Chen simply said, “Legislator, teach us.” Then we co-created and changed the distribution mechanism.

Part of the idea of digital democracy is getting the civil society involved in policymaking. Can you give examples where you’ve gotten the public to take part in policymaking?

Certainly. For example, when UberX first came to Taiwan in 2015, they argued that it’s “sharing economy,” meaning that people share their time voluntarily. However, there’s also other people, especially taxi drivers, that argued that it’s not really sharing economy because UberX didn’t even provide carpooling. The car is not really shared.

If we get into this ideological debate, we will get nowhere because people associate different feelings to the same word. However, we involved thousands of people in an online conversation called Polis, which you can check out at pol.is.

The Polis system basically ask a simple question. Given the UberX situation now, what do you feel about it? There is no right or wrong about feelings. I can feel that as a passenger in the backseat, I feel insecure because the liability insurance doesn’t apply to me when taking UberX in 2015. You cannot deny my feeling. This is my personal feeling, but you can resonate or not with the feeling.

It turns out most people resonate with most each other’s feelings most of the time on most of the things. By making a pro-social media rather than a antisocial media that focus on the definition of sharing economy, we eventually get everyone to agree on a common agenda, which we then use to make the multi-purpose taxi regulation and now a law.

Because of that, Uber is now a local taxi company in Taiwan. It’s called Q Taxi. There’s also LINE TAXI, other taxi companies that work with the Uber-like method but still subject to the regulation that protects the passengers.

So everybody has an opportunity to voice their feelings, and that gets reflected in what happens. Every Wednesday, you open your office to the public so that people can meet you in person to discuss their policy proposals. They also send their ideas to you online. What do you learn from this?

First of all, I find that when people understand that all conversations with me will be made public as a transcript, including this one, in the commons, then they tend to argue only from the point of public benefit, for obvious reasons. If they make something that’s beneficial to them but sacrifice the interest of other people, it will look very bad on the public transcript.

We use the Global Goals, the 17 goals, as a common agenda so that everyone who want to talk to me need to first declare which of the 17 Global Goals, the SDGs, are they really talking toward to.

Because of this, even people with different positions, we end up, by looking at the public transcripts of their asynchronous meetings, they eventually agree on the common values. Shared values out of different positions is what I have learned.

Interesting. In representative governments, we have lawmakers who represent citizens and make the laws. Why do you think it’s important to involve the citizens themselves in policymaking?

The policymakers who work in the parliament, like MP Kao Hung-an, they can, of course, represent people’s interests, like people in rural places who want to reduce the time it takes for them to get to the pharmacies, but they cannot represent people’s feelings. Their constituents may feel very differently.

There’s simply no way for one person to represent tens of thousands of people’s feelings. Because of this, we understand that systems like Polis is in the agenda-setting realm where people’s feelings resonate with one another, a process that I refer to as scalable listening, listening at scale, so that we understand what the common feeling of people is like.

Of course, the interests of people, as well as the implementation of the details, the development and the delivery of those, are, of course, still the subject for the professional lawmakers. I’m just saying that the discovery and the definition of common feelings, that digital democracy can help.

I see. You talk about this idea of radical transparency, including such as making this recording transcript available. Has there been any resistance in your administration against your efforts to be more transparent? What are the challenges in making a government totally open?

Of course. I work on a basis of voluntary association, so I don’t force people to talk to me. People talk to me voluntarily. In my office, there are secondments from various ministries. Here, we have 32 cabinet members. They may send secondments to my office to work in a way that’s radically transparent.

I’m sorry. What can they send?

Secondments, people who still report to them but work with me.

I see.

We have the ministries of, say, interior, finance, communication, culture, education, public diplomacy, very soon health and welfare, you name it. These are the ministries that work closely with people’s feelings. On the other hand, the ministry of defense never sent anyone, so I don’t force them to.

I see. So it’s purely on their part if they want to participate in this transparency or not.

That’s exactly right.

Taking a little broader perspective, in every society, there are problems that create divisions among people. How do you think people should find common ground? You spoke about this, about listening to each other’s feelings.

I’m thinking in some cases, digital technology seems to be making the divisions worse, such as people being in their own digital bubbles or echo chambers where they only see information that suits their views. How do you think, in this sort of environment, people should find common ground?

The social media may be pro-social like Polis or antisocial. I will not name names.

[laughs]

Because of that, it’s all upon the design of the social media. In Polis, as in our national participation platform, the Join platform, when people start a petition, there is no reply button. With no reply button, there’s no room for the trolls to grow. All you can do is upvote or downvote, meaning you resonate or not with my feelings, but you cannot make a personal attack against me.

I see. Interesting. There’s a potential for lots of people downvoting it perhaps.

Mm-hmm.

Overall, it’ll reflect the people who resonate. It’ll accurately reflect how many people resonate or not.

That’s what we call rough consensus. People agree on things they can live with, not necessarily that they think are perfect.

How do you see the future of democracy in Taiwan?

In Taiwan, democracy itself is a technology because we had our first presidential election, directly, in 1996. That’s already after the World Wide Web. Obviously, we see democracy as a applied social technology that we can change.

Indeed, the kernel of democracy, the constitution, went through five amendments in the years after the first presidential election. Just like you can change different semiconductor designs and layouts, you can change different bandwidth of democracy.

Not just five bits every four years, which is called voting, by the way, but also participatory budgeting, also petitioning online, also referenda, also presidential hackathon, sandbox applications, office hours with me. There’s various ways that can increase the bandwidth of uploading, not just downloading from the government, but uploading with the government as day-to-day democracy.

Interesting. So you see democracy as being this malleable something that we can design and shape ourselves.

That’s exactly right.

Minister Tang, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Likewise. That was…

Minister Tang, thank you very much for your time. I’m just wondering, do you have eight more minutes to spare for us?

Yes, I do.

Do you have to run?

Yes, I do. I do have five minutes.

Five minutes. We’ll finish in five minutes. I just want to have additional request. Can I just go through?

Mm-hmm.

Thank you for the great talk. In the earlier phase of the interview, you mentioned people learned from 2003 SARS. Taiwan had learned a lot from that experience. Can you give – I don’t know – one or two examples of what you have implemented after the 2003 SARS?

Certainly.

Do you want to know my request beforehand, or do you want to go one by one?

I think one by one is better. One concrete example is the setting up of the Central Epidemic Command Center, or the CECC, which is designed directly in response to the 2003 situation where the municipal and the central government was saying completely different things.

The CECC, with their daily press conferences and their very, very cute spokesdog, plays a very large role in this particular SARS 2.0 release and the countermeasures.

Thank you. Another one, when you mentioned SARS 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, I’m not sure if the listeners in the US might not know, might not refer to the terms. Maybe Yoshi can double-check with you what you’re referring when you say SARS 2.0. Is that OK? So we have a little…

He already did that as part of the interview.

Maybe in a quick way?

In a quick way? OK, sure.

Yeah, in a quick way because we only have three minutes each. I’m so sorry. Yo-san, maybe you can say to Minster Tang, “Do you mean SARS 2.0 as COVID-19?” Then you say, “Yes.” That’s it.

Oh, I see. This will be edited into the interview.

Sure. Of course.

Minister Tang, when you talk about SARS 2.0, you talk about COVID-19?

That’s exactly right.

OK.

Thank you. The last thing, this is about the digital democracy. Is it possible for you to describe what is digital democracy in, say, one phrase? Is it too much to ask you?

I already did. Digital democracy is everyone’s business with everyone’s help through listening at scale.

Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. I will edit the broadcast. I will send the broadcast to Zack, if that’s OK with you. OK.

Of course.

Thank you so much.

I’ll send you this recording. We will make a transcript. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you for the great interview.

Thank you for the time. Bye-bye.

Live long and prosper. Bye.

Live long and prosper.

Bye-bye. Thank you.