I’m very excited to be joined this evening. It’s morning in Taipei and evening in Los Angeles.

Sometimes we just say, good local time.

Good local time for this hopeful conversation about why international institutions need Taiwan. It’s a huge honor to be joined by Audrey Tang, who is Taiwan’s cyber ambassador and first Digital Minister from 2016 to 2024, when I had the tremendous fortune of interviewing her for our film Invisible Nation . She is a pioneer of digital democracy and the 2025 Right Livelihood Laureate.

I’m also thrilled to be joined by Michael Fern, who’s become a friend and is a cybercrime prosecutor and Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County, chair of the International Law Section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, and author of American Bar Association Resolution 700 supporting Taiwan’s inclusion in global institutions.

Michael made a very moving short video, which is on my Substack and which I will reshare (linked here) , about UN General Assembly Resolution 2758—how it’s been misused, and why Taiwan really should be included in the UN.

Global governance is at a crossroads, and the world is witnessing escalating geopolitical fragmentation—from Russia’s nuclear threats to China’s intentions toward Taiwan, to the unraveling of the Western alliance under America’s now chaotic turn. At this moment of uncertainty, Taiwan’s exclusion from major international organizations poses a defining question for the future of global legitimacy. This hopeful conversa tion envisions what a more inclusive, plural, and effective international order might look like—one that recognizes contribution, not coercion, as the basis of participation.

Thank you both for being here. Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Michael.

Thank you. I do want to state at the outset that the views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of any entity I’m employed by or affiliated with.

Yes, for me too.

Yes, thank you very much for sharing your personal views. Okay, great.

So, why is Taiwan’s inclusion in international organizations urgent today? Audrey, can you start us off?

Sure. I think the biggest misunderstanding so far is conflating participation with recognition. Sometimes we hear this idea that a zero-sum sovereignty battle is happening in international organizations. But it’s actually a public-interest question, because most international organizations run on functional participation—sharing data, following standards, coordinating in emergencies. Taiwan’s track record in the WTO and APEC proves that contribution-based participation works without touching diplomatic recognition or zero-sum battles.

The main misunderstanding I personally face is about UN General Assembly Resolution 2758. Legal analyses by the German Marshall Fund, the UK Parliament, and the European Parliament now confirm that the resolution does not actually mention Taiwan, nor does it determine Taiwan’s status, and so it does not preclude participation. However, for many decades, Beijing has treated it as a blank check—but it is not a blank check.

So who needs to hear this? I think permanent representatives and secretariat officials who mistake political pressure for legal obligation. Administrative inertia is not international law. Like-minded democracies that depend on multilateral reliability must also hear this, because they have the most to gain from insisting these systems work as designed.

Incredibly well said. I hope everyone can absorb this. I’m very happy—we will share the transcript of this panel along with the video so that people can really review your carefully thought-out words. It’s very important.

Michael, do you have anything you’d like to add to that answer?

Sure. I think one of the most misunderstood arguments against including Taiwan is the idea that it will raise tensions with Beijing or be a catalyst for conflict to recognize or to include Taiwan. I actually think it’s the opposite.

Including Taiwan—recognizing Taiwan’s role—is what allows the region to maintain peace and stability. The invisibility of Taiwan is, frankly, a risk for conflict, because part of the PRC’s long-term strategy is to isolate Taiwan, to block Taiwan’s relations with other countries, in order to make it easier one day to use force to take it over.

The more Taiwan is interconnected with the world—economically, diplomatically, and politically—the stronger the conditions are for peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.

Yes, thank you so much. From a law and security perspective, Michael, what are the tangible risks when Taiwan is cut off from cooperation—whether in public health, cybersecurity, or aviation safety?

Taiwan is at the forefront of all these areas. Taiwan is one of the frontiers in cybersecurity and defense. It’s constantly being probed and attacked by different groups, many of which we believe are from the People’s Republic of China.

There’s a lot the world can learn from that—just as many Baltic states have experienced cyberattacks from Russia. These smaller states on the so-called periphery of our consciousness are actually great places for the world to learn how authoritarian regimes try to undermine societies.

In terms of public health, it goes without saying that Taiwan has a fantastic public health system—one of the world’s best and least expensive. Taiwan was at the forefront of giving the world warnings about COVID-19. If those alerts from contacts in China had been heeded, they might have helped prevent some of the destruction we saw during the pandemic and the lockdowns.

Taiwan was one of the most successful countries because of its proactive policies and early quarantine measures, long before many other countries took action.

Yes, in fact—Audrey, you have this expertise. I remember from our interview in Taipei for Invisible Nation , the “humor over rumor” campaign. You spearheaded these brilliant efforts that got people in Taiwan up to speed on what to do during COVID. Please share.

Yes. “Humor over rumor” was in February 2020. We had just started rationing masks. I remember speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) about how important that was.

We open-sourced the real-time pharmacy mask inventory as open data for civic technologists, and within 72 hours they built dozens of apps to help citizens find resources. Peer-reviewed research confirmed that this kind of public-sector transparency enabled rapid grassroots response while reducing panic.

Instead of one side saying, “You need the highest-grade N95; the medical masks we’re rationing are just placebo,” and the other side saying, “It’s all about ventilation, masks hurt you and N95 kills you,” it didn’t polarize like that in Taiwan.

We created a very funny meme: a Shiba Inu, a cute dog, wearing a mask, with a paw saying, “Mask protects you from your dirty unwashed hands.” So if you don’t like wearing a mask, I like wearing a mask; I’m just reminding you to wash your hands. That humor over rumor pre-bunked the tension and polarization around mask use.

We did similar things around contact tracing, vaccination, and so on.

But when WHO excludes Taiwan, these innovations stay siloed. These weren’t just experiments; they worked. We lost only seven people in 2020 to COVID.

But because these approaches could not be integrated into global training, exercises, standards, or reporting protocols, that interoperable trust stayed in Taiwan and in a few partners like New Zealand, which did learn from the Taiwan playbook.

Exclusion keeps Taiwan isolated, but the real harm is to global health.

Absolutely. It’s not enough that I personally learned “humor over rumor” and had the advantage of learning from Taiwan. Through Invisible Nation , we hope the whole world can see and learn from Taiwan—but including Taiwan in international organizations like the World Health Organization is what will make the real difference.

Your incredible work and innovation need to be shared.

Audrey, Taiwan has built some of the world’s most responsive digital systems. How does its exclusion weaken global capacity to respond to crises that demand openness and data sharing?

That’s a great question. What Taiwan has built has three layers.

First, technical and professional access—not just in health data, as we just discussed, but also public health in environmental sensing. We have some of the world’s densest networks for environmental sensing: not just climate, but also air quality, water quality, noise levels, and so on.

Second, we turned this into basic education. In 2019, we changed our curriculum from literacy—consuming information—to competency—producing information together. Institutional fact-checking alone does not inoculate young minds from polarization and conspiracy theories. But going through the fact-checking process as a peer group does; they learn the art of pre-bunking.

This should be part of international curricula so that people around the world can do social translation across cultures, see through one another’s eyes, and avoid being polarized by out-of-context information manipulation.

Third, we need legal enforcement. Taiwan is the first country in the world to require full-spectrum digital signatures for online advertisements. Because of that, throughout the past year we’ve had no deepfake scam ads.

If you scroll Facebook or YouTube in Taiwan, you just don’t see those crypto-investment or similar scam ads.

Now we’re seeing, for example, Japan looking to adopt the Taiwan model for full-spectrum KYC (“Know Your Customer”) and related measures.

So it’s not just civic competency and expert consensus. At some point, bottom-up protocol-setting becomes national law. We also need ways to interoperate such laws among nations so cybercriminals cannot simply arbitrage by registering and posting in the most vulnerable jurisdictions.

Wow. We spoke in advance about this next question. We want to keep Taiwan at the center of our conversation, but since we’re talking about international organizations and the broader international order, it feels like we can’t ignore this recent speech by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney describing a rupture in the international order—that we’re no longer in a transition.

And Chris Horton, a journalist with a new book about Taiwan called Ghost Nation —whom I’ve just interviewed for A Hopeful Conversation —has argued that this international order Carney critiques has never really served Taiwan .

Can you speak to where we are in the international order? In my opinion, if smaller and medium-sized countries like Canada and Taiwan could drive the international order, we’d all be in a much better place. But I’m sure you both have strong views. Audrey, would you like to go first?

Sure. As you said, Taiwan was never really fully served by the rules-based international order. So while Prime Minister Carney’s speech resonates with many nations that depend on rules to maintain a level playing field, that same “level playing field” allowed 23.5 million people to be excluded from the global agenda and let political pressure masquerade as institutional rule.

The real question is: what principles drive the coming reconfiguration? A reconfiguration is coming. If coercion sets the terms, that’s regression. But if contribution, transparency, and interoperability become the threshold for participation, that could be evolution.

Taiwan’s situation is a test case for any proposed new international order: do we build systems where demonstrated competence earns a seat—yes or no? If yes, it’s a better order. If not, it’s not evolution. If we accept a system where might makes right, that’s not the direction we want. The answer we give for Taiwan tells us where global governance is heading.

Beautifully said. Michael, would you like to add to that?

Sure. To some degree, I lean toward Chris Horton’s view . His piece was spot-on in explaining that when we talk about the “international order,” we’re talking about an order in which Taiwan is excluded.

The irony is that Taiwan—at least when the Republic of China government sat in China—was one of the UN’s founding members in 1945, even though it was then an authoritarian state based in China until it was driven exclusively to Taiwan in 1949.

There’s an idealized version of the postwar order that Carney talks about. But in truth, it’s a post-World War II order created by the victors, including authoritarian states. It’s been imperfect from the start, and power politics have always shaped it.

The United States has been the so-called global hegemon and, for many years, supported peace, security, global trade, and—to varying degrees—human rights. My concern today is that under the current administration we’re sliding back from that. I hope that’s not permanent, but we’ll see.

Yes, we’ll see.

Audrey, you have this brilliant concept of “plurality” that suggests democracy thrives on inclusive systems. What would a modern, plural global architecture look like if it were designed today?

Your words already give me hope. I agree with what both of you are saying, and Michael, what you added. It’s upsetting—such a regression—to think the world could be based only on might-makes-right. We know that’s wrong. We know violence is wrong. We know endless war is not what we want.

There are these leading-light democracies like Taiwan, which could help everyone understand the way forward, if only they were allowed to. We can learn so much from you.

So please share, Audrey: what is it in your concept of plurality that would lead us to a better global order?

Plurality is fundamentally about community by design. Instead of technologies that pull people out of communities into a global social-media space that promotes polarization and “engagement through enragement,” plurality turns it around so that conflicts within and across communities are seen not as volcanoes to flee from, but as geothermal energy to tap for co-creation.

Taiwan, being the youngest tectonic island—only about four million years old—knows something about earthquakes and how they push Taiwan skyward by about half a centimeter each year.

The plurality governance model is what my colleague Caroline Green and I have been developing at the University of Oxford. We think of human and AI systems—and many other systems—interoperating. We call it a six-pack of care; the framework lives at 6pack.care .

Imagine global governance—of AI agents and humans—not as a hierarchy with gatekeepers at each level, but as an ecosystem of many local guardians, like the Japanese concept of kami , or local spirits.

The kami of a river has no ambition to manage the forest; its purpose is fulfilled by ensuring the river thrives. The forest kami does the same for the forest. They interoperate through shared protocols, not central command.

From this, three design principles flow:

1. Composability — don’t lock participation into a single recognition status; break it into layers—data-sharing, standard-setting, joint exercises, mutual recognition in capacity building—so entities participate wherever they can contribute.
2. Verifiability — claims and risk reports must be auditable, reducing the space for rumor and political manipulation.
3. Interoperable trust — in domains like health, aviation, and technical agreements for cross-border cooperation, trust frameworks should be protected from political disruption; expertise must flow even when politics is gridlocked.

In summary, modern governance architecture should work like how AI agents and humans interact on the internet—focused on protocols and interoperability, not a single power center deciding who gets to connect.

So inspiring! Michael, can international law adapt within existing structures, or does justice for unrecognized nations require building something entirely new?

With the caveat that I’m not an international-law specialist—I’m just a lawyer—my observation is that we need fundamental change in how things work.

We saw this in 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia used its permanent veto on the UN Security Council to block effective action—and it still sits there.

Two of the world’s leading authoritarian states, Russia and China, are permanent members of the UN Security Council. That’s part of the post-World War II order.

I don’t have much confidence that the UN can reform itself. It’s financially strapped, increasingly dependent on China for funding, while the U.S. has pulled back.

If anything, I fear the UN will become even less effective in advancing human rights, peace, and security, and in defending small democracies. What replaces it? I don’t know.

Audrey is giving us hope for the future. But I have a follow-up question for you, Michael.

In transnational law enforcement, cooperation depends on trust and data sharing. How does Taiwan’s exclusion make all of us more vulnerable to cybercrime and disinformation?

Part of it is that Taiwan is really at the forefront of attacks every day by China—hacking, infiltration, disinformation campaigns, and the use of Chinese apps to spread that disinformation.

The U.S. has begun to look at this, but Taiwan’s proximity and its role as a leading tech hub make its experience uniquely valuable.

There’s so much to learn from how Taiwan handles its own cybersecurity, especially as a key node in supply chains of talent, hardware, and software that are essential to addressing these threats.

I’d love to hear more from Audrey about policies or laws in Taiwan that could be adapted elsewhere.

Audrey, yes—you have this expertise. Please share more on this question Michael has raised; your work fighting disinformation on behalf of Taiwan is extraordinary.

I recently co-authored a piece in Science about malicious AI swarms and how to overcome them .

Today, disinformation—defined as something false—is giving way to “vibe attacks”: thousands of AI-agent-driven accounts, each sharing a piece of news that may be factual, but expressed with intense emotion.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling strongly, but when you’re surrounded by such content, it creates an illusion of consensus—like astroturfing.

Think of the meme with a dog sitting in a house on fire, enjoying the warmth and light, saying, “This is fine.” It’s not fine.

People are being surrounded by synthetic intimacy, generated by AI systems that are superhumanly persuasive across cultures. To fight that, you can’t just focus on content.

The content layer is almost useless now, because synthetic intimacy can spread via direct messages and small group chats, making much of the public-information defense apparatus ineffective.

Taiwan’s approach focuses on actors and behaviors instead.

For example, a couple of years ago we sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers in Taiwan—so we knew they were local residents—from the certified government number 111 , so everyone knew it was official.

The message was simple:

“Deepfakes threaten information security and integrity online. What should we do together?”

This wasn’t a minister announcing a top-down policy; it was an invitation for people to brainstorm.

Thousands volunteered. We selected 447 people as a statistical microcosm of Taiwan’s population, balanced by gender, age, and other factors. In groups of ten, they deliberated online, each person engaging with nine others, under a ground rule that you had to convince each other for an idea to become law.

One group proposed that all online ads should display something like a cigarette warning label and that only a digital signature could authorize their removal—creating fiduciary authentication.

Another group proposed that if Facebook or YouTube publishes an unsigned ad and someone loses, say, seven or eight million dollars because of it, the platform should be jointly liable for the damage—since it effectively became a partner in crime.

A third group pointed out that TikTok did not yet have a legal representative office in Taiwan. If it ignored our liability rules, what then? Their solution was to slow down connections to TikTok by 1% each day they ignored us—throttling, not censorship. In practice, the Chinese app “小红书” (Xiaohongshu), “Little Red Book,” actually triggered this clause.

We then used AI systems to weave these ideas into coherent draft rules. Participants voted at the end of the day; 85% agreed , and the remaining 15% could at least live with the outcome. The resulting law passed within a few months.

That’s why, throughout the past year, there have been no deepfake scam ads on Taiwanese social media.

And because cybercrime is non-partisan—there’s no pro-cybercrime party—this made our polity more anti-fragile . Instead of one side arguing for freedom of speech and the other for public safety, the two reinforced each other, like plates bumping together and lifting “玉山” (Yushan, Jade Mountain) higher.

The legislation matters, but the process itself is widely shareable .

I love it. I love all these visual metaphors, too—they’re very evocative. We need to make a Miyazaki film, or a Taiwanese animated film, to demonstrate all of this.

Audrey, what incremental reforms could global institutions make now to include Taiwan, even symbolically, without requiring full recognition?

This again comes in three layers .

On the technical and professional layer : the World Health Organization of the UN (WHO) holds technical meetings in which Taiwan has occasionally participated. We should expand and stabilize that participation. WHO itself has acknowledged Taiwan’s expert involvement. Making it systematic, not ad hoc , would go a long way.

On the standards layer : the Taipei Flight Information Region (FIR) served about 1.85 million flights annually pre-pandemic. Excluding the Taipei FIR airspace from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s standard-setting and information exchange is a system failure , not a policy choice.

For example, during the 2022 PLA exercises , Taiwan had to rely on Japan and the Philippines to reroute civilian flights because ICAO was effectively unavailable as a channel. Fixing this would improve safety for everyone.

On legal interoperability : Taiwan has been excluded from Interpol for over four decades . At minimum, we need a direct cooperation window on human trafficking networks and cybercrime incidents .

I don’t think that’s controversial—criminals shouldn’t benefit from institutional gaps. There is no pro–organized-crime international bloc, as far as I know. The political opening exists.

Democratic parliaments have clarified that Resolution 2758 does not preclude Taiwan’s participation , and the American Bar Association has passed Resolution 700 supporting this inclusion. Secretariats no longer need to treat political pressure as a legal obligation on any of these three layers.

Yes, brilliantly said. Michael, do you have anything you’d like to add?

The practical challenge is that China remains, in some respects, more influential than the U.S. in shaping bodies such as WHO and Interpol. Interpol has had PRC leadership, and WHO has also seen Chinese influence at the top.

The core problem is political. At a functional level, Taiwan simply needs enough votes from member states to join or even observe.

How do you get those votes? Taiwan needs to expand its international allies—not just big countries, but also small states .

So while the solutions are technically straightforward, the obstacles are political. As Audrey points out, the current “band-aid” is to rely on friendly nations— Japan, the Philippines, the United States —to convey Taiwanese expertise to international organizations or to relay information from bodies like Interpol back to Taiwan. That’s the status quo.

The question is: how can Taiwan build enough international support to secure at least observer status?

I seem to recall, Audrey, that there may be a digital solution to this that you came up with—digital diplomacy around the countries that support Taiwan. Can you speak a little about that?

Definitely. You’re perhaps referring to my 2017 participation in the UN Internet Governance Forum in Geneva through telepresence .

The gatekeeping was literally at the door. Last I checked, robots don’t need passports. So a telepresence robot entered, and I connected to it. It didn’t “represent” me so much as re-present me—my face on the robot.

I believe that was the first time a PRC envoy and a Taiwanese minister spoke in the same UN meeting on the record . It set a precedent. I’ve been able to participate in many UN meetings this way.

But this isn’t only about using telepresence to bypass politics. It’s also a demonstration—not just a protest —showing that open, verifiable, replicable cooperation can build trust across communities even when formal diplomatic channels are blocked.

In a sense, the dialogue between the PRC envoy and me at the IGF was itself a proof of concept . And during the pandemic, of course, this kind of remote participation became the norm.

Yes, so brilliant. Finally, this is our last question—but if either of you want to add more of your expertise or knowledge, we can go a little longer.

What are the lessons that mid-sized democratic nations can take from Taiwan’s resilience in navigating a system that seems stacked against them?

I’m thinking about everything Taiwan can share so others can learn—and how that might help build the new international system we hope to see. Audrey, would you like to go first?

Sure—three simple lessons.

First, treat transparency as strategic security infrastructure—cognitive security . Transparency is not just a moral posture; it’s the foundation of societal cohesion amid information manipulation and malicious AI swarms. When government is radically open, it’s much harder for malign actors to fill information vacuums.

Second, treat civil society organizations as partners, not onlookers . Civic tech communities like Taiwan’s g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”) are not “mobilized” by ministers; they are co-creators of policy . This relationship multiplies state capacity without expanding state overreach.

Third, when recognition is blocked, make contribution undeniable . Taiwan’s indispensable contributions in semiconductors, democratic innovation, and crisis response mean that its exclusion visibly weakens the systems that practice it.

The point is not that Taiwan needs recognition; it’s that the international system needs Taiwan to maintain its own anti-fragility .

Yes, yes. So well said. Michael, please share what you’d add.

What comes to mind is the Benjamin Franklin quote: “We must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately.”

That still applies to many smaller countries today.

Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many of the munitions Russia uses contain chips manufactured in Taiwan. Taiwan is a critical part of that supply chain. The international system needs to include Taiwan if it wants to address proliferation of these components to countries that use them to bombard and invade others.

And just to be clear for people listening: Taiwan is not supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine . Taiwan supports Ukraine. The issue is that as the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturing hub, Taiwan produces chips that end up—often via Chinese companies, or others—in weapons used by Russia. U.S. chips are also found in these systems. We live in an interconnected world.

If we want to address problems like cybercrime or arms proliferation, where bombs are made from components sourced worldwide, Taiwan must be part of the conversation because of how critical it is.

For smaller countries more broadly, each has some core competency that others rely on. Greenland , though not an independent country, is a major source of rare earths. Estonia , bordering Russia and highly digitally advanced, is another country in a situation somewhat like Taiwan’s—small, democratic, and at risk from a powerful authoritarian neighbor. These countries have a natural affinity with Taiwan.

There is space for an alliance of smaller democracies under threat , who can band together and support one another.

Yes. I keep thinking about the UK as well. There are so many powerful countries that happen to be geographically small but wield outsized influence. It would be to the world’s benefit to have greater impact and influence from Taiwan. It’s such a basic idea.

Audrey, you’ve given us so much hope for what could be in a world where Taiwan is given the place it deserves, and where international institutions understand that they need Taiwan. Do you have any concluding thoughts you’d like to add?

Yes. My main message is that Taiwan is not a problem; Taiwan is the solution .

If Taiwan is excluded, that creates a systemic risk the whole world carries. When we let contribution be blocked by coercion, we teach institutions that power overrides rules. But if we design participation to be composable, verifiable, and interoperable , we repair the legitimacy of global cooperation.

Our next generation should not inherit a global order fractured by fear. It deserves a commonwealth that works in a plural world. After all, no democracy is an island—not even Taiwan .

So let’s free the future together.

Yes, that’s so beautiful. That’s a perfect way to end. I’m so grateful for your time. Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Michael, for being here. Thank you to everyone who will watch and read this. We hope to help bring this world to a better place through Taiwan.

Thank you.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.