If you could explain, I was told this is your first foreign visit since August, when you…
Yes, since the inauguration of moda.
Of your Ministry?
Yeah, of my Ministry. This sends a very clear message that Lithuania is our closest neighbor, in terms of shared values.
What do you mean?
The moda was established after the Russian war on Ukraine. Our slogan #FreeTheFuture means that we want to keep Taiwan and the world free from authoritarian expansionism. Digital resilience for all is our main work item.
When we talk about resilience, it means not just satellite communication resilience, data centers that can still stay available after earthquakes, natural, and so on. Also, societal resilience, how the democracies can react and overcome the online harms by authoritarian expansionist actors without sacrificing our press freedom, without sacrificing the human rights, online.
Because for many jurisdictions, it was a trade-off. You either close off some of your press freedom in order to counter online harm, or you allow this kind of freedom but then the viral toxicity, the polarization, overtakes the democracy and society. The same as the public health and human rights debate during the pandemic years.
Just like Lithuania, Taiwan chose consciously to overcome these counter-democratic trends through more democracy, through more press freedom, through more inclusivity. We found that in Lithuania, people think the same way as we do. I want to send a very clear message that it’s not just Taiwan who think this way, in Europe, at least Lithuania is thinking about it the same way as well.
Yesterday, you were in a commemoration of the January 1991 events in Lithuania, when 13 civilians were killed by the Soviet army as they tried to overthrow…
Very touching. I went to the cemetery this morning.
You went to the cemetery to…
To lay flowers.
What dos these events mean to you?
A lot. My father was a journalist. My mother, too. My father, in 1989, was covering the Tiananmen protest. He stayed in Tiananmen until the 1st of June, not three days later. He returned to Taiwan, I guess, in time.
That changed his life, and to a degree, my life as well, because he then pursued PhD research in Saarbrücken, in Saarland, Germany. I went there to study, with him, for a year. A lot of his research partners were the very young people who were in Tiananmen, but were forced to be in exile and to continue their education in Germany.
Some of them would go on to live in Taiwan in a safer place, even becoming professors. Their students are the civil disobedience actors of the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014, where we non-violently defended the parliament, occupied the parliament for three weeks, in rejection of authoritarian expansionism to keep Taiwan’s democracy free.
After three weeks of thoroughly non-violent and civil discussions, the head of the parliament eventually agreed to the students’ demand in the Sunflower Movement.
In the Sunflower Movement, I was part of the team responsible for reaching out to international civil society, to international media, to coordinate broadcasting video communication, to defend the WiMAX connectivity at the time, around the parliament, to provide ample bandwidth for the journalists to do their work.
I see very similar dynamics in the footage that was played during the video tower, the TV tower, that one is not alone if one’s struggle to defend freedom is seen in real-time by everyone around the world that cares about freedom.
I wanted to ask, does this make your mission as a minister more poignant? To see these pictures of authoritarian regime trying…whatever authoritarian regimes do when they try to squash up independence?
Yes, this makes it, as you said, more poignant to the mission that we’re doing. Also, it makes it all more urgent, all more real, that our effort to help Ukraine, to provide humanitarian aid and digital infrastructure and reconstruction, and your plans to do the same, make it much more urgent for us to work together, because we share the same urgency in our heart.
Can you talk more about the plans in Ukraine?
A little bit. [laughs] Taiwan has already provided humanitarian aid, in terms of generators, equipments, and so on. We’re also thinking about the digital layer, because in Taiwan since 2016, digital infrastructure is a forward-looking infrastructure. Starting this year, digital infrastructure is also public construction by law.
It means that our private sector, when coordinating with the public sector, has the same incentives for practicing their participation in public construction projects, even though it’s not of concrete. We want to make this message known to the Taiwanese community that Lithuania is a trusted partner when it comes to reconstruction in Ukraine.
When it comes to the trust that the other, not just Ukraine, but other similar-valued democracies place in Lithuania to power its e-government system, the e-Residency systems, or the software systems, Lithuania is in a place of trust and held in high regard by OECD and by other international organizations.
That is the main message I want to take back to the Taiwanese business community, so that we can join together in the digital infrastructure that enable communication, education, and so on.
What kind of digital infrastructure plans do you have in Ukraine after the war?
I will just describe what our plans are in Taiwan, and then you can maybe extrapolate.
(laughter)
In Taiwan, starting last year, in even the most rural and remote areas in Taiwan, we have this idea of one tablet per child, so that everyone can practice their co-creation, their competence in co-creation with students and teachers from afar, to join student groups together without the teacher having to physically visit those remote areas, because in Taiwan, as in Lithuania, broadband is like tap water. Everywhere has broadband.
What didn’t exist before then is this coordinated investment in education technology that can bring multiple classrooms together, that can share the resources that one teacher developed for their class, can be immediately transferred to other teachers in other classes, and for them to collaborate together to learn digitally.
This is part of the Taiwanese education reform that changes the idea of digital literacy or media literacy to digital competence or media competence. Literacy is when the students are at the receiving end of standardized answers or curriculums. Competence is when they become co-creators.
With machine learning that bridges the 20 Taiwanese national languages, including the sign language, we can bring people of very different cultures together through real-time translations between the different Taiwanese languages. That’s the extent I can say right now.
Basically, you want to make Ukraine more like Taiwan?
We want to provide what has enabled the various peoples in Taiwan to be a trans-cultural learning community despite very different backgrounds.
Did you speak to the Ukraine government about it? Did you have opportunity to speak to them?
Before I become the Minister of Digital Affairs, or really entering the cabinet in 2016, I’m part of this civil society movement called gov-zero or g0v. I participated along with civil society hacktivists. For example, the president of this hackathon in Paris, as part of the Open Government Partnership.
Now, at the time, the Ukrainian people was doing very similar things. There’s ProZorro for open contracting procurement systems. There’s the similar push in open data, civil society enablement, and so on. As a hacktivist, we’ve made many friends.
(laughter)
We work on common projects on GitHub and other open source, open science projects together. I would say that some of these connections are still alive.
Even I’ve become minister, I still work not for the government but with the government, and not for the people but with the people. These people-to-people ties continue to this day.
Many of the innovations during the ProZorro days are now found in the digital transformation unit in Ukraine.
You’re in contact with them?
In a people-to-people way.
[laughs] Let’s move a little bit to the side. You’re one of the central figures in coordinating Taiwan’s response to COVID pandemic. You spoke at length about how successful Taiwan’s experience was, based on establishing trust between the people – by listening to people, by reacting to their concerns quickly, by adding interactive talks, and all those things.
As the mainland China is undergoing COVID of its own, which obviously you are aware of, what could China do better currently? What would your suggestion be, based on your experience in Taiwan?
Our experience in Taiwan largely is to make sure that the State is transparent to the citizens.
We rely on, for example, every 2:00 PM, the CECC press conference works like an “ask me anything” in front of journalists. Also we trust our citizens, in that if you just call 1922, the toll-free number, someone with a lot of empathy, a real person not a voice recorder, will listen to you.
If your ideas are better than that of the government’s, chances are, 24 hours afterwards in the next 2:00 PM press conference, your idea will become national policy. That is civic engagement.
We have shared many of those components – the dashboard, the mask rationing visualization, and so on – as public code, as open source. Not just open data, but also open source, that can be readily adapted by any jurisdiction. Indeed, the mask visualization rationing was adopted in South Korea, the dashboard is jointly co-created with the Tokyo metropolitan government, and so on.
There is a lot of existing practices in public health that can be readily adopted by anyone in any jurisdiction.
Based on your experience in managing COVID’s pandemic and talking to people, how successful is China at the moment with its own population?
If you measure the key metrics that Taiwan uses, which is how transparent the state and its daily numbers are to the citizens, to everyone on the ground, so that everyone can make informed decisions about what’s actually happening.
There are a lot of messages that we’re hearing from the WHO, the scientific community, and so on, on how the world would like to help any jurisdiction that wants to make its data and its information more transparent. I think that is the general sense of the research direction.
In Taiwan, we contribute by not just maintaining our own open data pipelines but also sharing, as Taiwan model, our playbook so that any jurisdiction can adopt that.
More generally, can any intrinsically authoritative government copy Taiwan’s model?
Ultimately, it is not strictly about authoritarianism or democracy – I think it is about press freedom. It’s about journalism. As I mentioned, the Taiwanese model relies heavily on the journalists asking the tough questions every 2:00 PM and on civic journalism, on people finding out what’s wrong with our pandemic response… Or maybe not wrong, per se, but the virus has mutated, so the original measures become wrong in light of the new variant of the virus.
So it’s both professional and civic journalism and the press liberties, the freedom that enabled us to respond in a Agile way our governance system vis-à-vis those new variants.
To any government, it’s not about the election nor about the way to appoint successors and so on. Fundamentally, the litmus test is how much freedom do you give to civic and professional journalists to reflect what is actually happening with the virus.
Overall, how do you weigh… I want to ask, clearly, overall, how do you rate China’s response to the pandemic currently.
It’s a large place. In each and every jurisdiction and its subdivisions, we have seen consistently that the more rapid the adaptation is, the more transparent the communication is, the more freedom that the journalists have, then the more likely that the citizens will make informed choices when it comes to counter-pandemic.
That’s not the case in China, right?
I think it’s not a very uniform place… For many people, their experience when it comes to pandemic control is that of learning together. We first learned about efficacy of masks and the various different types of masks, of hand-washing, of physical distancing, in Taiwan, about contract tracing and how it protects privacy, and so on.
Any jurisdiction, even just a city, even just a town, that engages with this kind of group learning practices so people know without fear about what’s actually going on in their neighborhood and with science, that will help them.
You ask a very umbrella question on a very large swathe of community. I think it can be improved in any particular group or any particular community if people engage in the sort of collaborative learning, transparency, and, most importantly, the freedom of the press.
Do you have an update on the satellite project to keep the communications of Taiwan going in any case?
The commercial application period of our first spectrum allocation has collected two commercial vendors interested in, as you said, keep our communications open. The proof of concept for resilience during earthquakes, natural and unnatural, is also progressing pretty well.
We want to source as many vendors, as many constellations, as possible. In addition to that, we’re also working with public cloud vendors. Taiwan has its own government cloud and also the National Center for High-Speed Computation.
One of the concerns that we have is that, chances are that during a large earthquake, it makes more sense to activate some backup systems in territories outside of Taiwan. We want to ensure the security much as the encryption, but also the control of those computations of our data.
We have been in talks and quite successfully with some of the public cloud to do two things. First, they would establish local zones or local regions in Taiwan administered physically only by people of Taiwanese nationality so that we can rest assured that even when all the submarine cables are cut somehow, the computations can be done in Taiwan in a safe and secure way.
The second is that when the backbone via those satellites connects to abroad, we can also be sure that we work with multiple public cloud vendors. Any large earthquake will have to destroy multiple public cloud vendors, and that is very unlikely. We find strength in plurality.
What’s the time horizon for these projects? Do you expect to finish them this year?
The 700 satellite receivers, which I believe are what you’re referring to, some of them will be fixed on the ground. Some of them will be mobile. The initial layout will be finished by this year, but, over the course of next year, we will do more testing and potentially reconfiguration.
A lot of the tests here is on the physical properties of those satellites. For some uses, maybe middle-earth orbit is enough for a slightly higher latency by wide coverage. For some cases, if we test and it require the use of lower-earth orbit, then we may switch the different sort of receivers, or vice versa.
This will be a time where we put various actual use cases in testing. Based on the results of the testing, we may reconfigure or we may seek out even more additional vendors both in terms of constellations and also of the ground link and public cloud.
Do you have a date when the German minister is visiting you in Taipei?
Not yet.
Is it January or February?
I don’t know yet.
What does the visit mean to you and to Taiwan?
You mean the Education Minister?
Is it the increased recognition?
Yes, increased recognition. Also, in addition to that, it’s a confirmation, affirming our shared values. As I mentioned in the previous answer, when two jurisdictions have broadband like tap water, it doesn’t matter how close or far we are, because it travels on the speed of light anyway. What matters then is not just compatibility, but alignment of our shared values.
Face-to-face conversations is best to kick-off the initial mutual understanding, trust, and friendship, when it comes to shared and aligned values, but all the working-level conversations can continue then with broadband video conferencing.
I want to give more time to properly film that. Do you need same hardware for both of these to work?
They’re very similar. To me, the date here is like the forget-me-not.
(laughter)
So you know when you were here?
Yeah. It’s to remind everyone, that in the future in Taiwan, that I show this to, I will also tell the whole story.
You have to come within three years to renew it.
Definitely.
(laughter)
There’s an office in Taipei. I can go to there to renew it.
Yeah, so you just go there.
That’s what the representative’s office are for…
(laughter)
Do they tell you who the other two Taiwanese are?
No, it’s their privacy. A very privacy-respecting people.
(laughter)
I’m the fourth.
You’re fourth?
Yeah. My senior secretary, the fifth.
Is it possible for Lithuania to get this?
Yes. Not many people know that. We are working on a digital gold card program, so that anyone who can work like a digital nomad across borders, can get such cards without visiting Taiwan, and the details of which will be revealed first half this year.
(laughter)
The person responsible for that is right here.
(laughter)
Any more visits for you?
You mean…?
After Lithuania?
I’ll spend a night in Warsaw and then straight back for the cabinet reshuffle in a couple weeks.
(laughter)
The important bit.