To me, bubble tea symbolizes “open innovation.” Because it’s not patented, you can use white pearls, black pearls, black tea, green tea, rooibos tea—it doesn’t matter. You can mix it however you like, and no one will sue you. It’s all open innovation. I think this represents the dynamic nature ...

On a personal note, my father’s parents—my paternal grandmother was on the losing side of World War II, while my paternal grandfather was on the winning side. Obviously, it took some time for these two social groups to de-polarize. But today, Taiwan has one of the lowest levels of social, ...

I completely agree. A decade ago, Taiwanese society was very polarized. You could see it in the use of flags. At rallies, you would see either the flag of the Republic of China or a pro-Taiwan independence flag, like the whale flag, but never both. They were in completely separate ...

So, no, I am not afraid. I think there’s a situation in the US where each side demonizes the other, and only the most extreme voices from both sides go viral, so they have a very negative view of the other side. But I do believe there is a lot ...

I was born with naturally low testosterone, somewhere in between, but I’ve never let it bother me. My pronoun is “whatever.” I really don’t care. In Mandarin, the pronouns for he, she, and it—tā, tā, tā—are all pronounced identically. So, you don’t have to be forced to change your language ...

Thank you for your kind words. In Taiwan, we have a saying: “Pressure makes diamonds.” Taiwan is a diamond of democracy, and we are very happy to export our experience.

In 2017, I decided not to use the then-popular term “fake news.” I strongly disliked the term because both my parents are journalists, and I felt “fake news” was an insult to their profession. So, out of filial piety, I did not use the term or its translation. We use ...

Of course, this is not to say we don’t have any content-based laws; laws against content like child sexual abuse material still exist. What I mean is that in many of our laws, like the Anti-Fraud Special Act, we only encourage platform operators to restrict illegal “behaviors,” such as fraud. ...

What is unique about Taiwan is that we have the highest degree of internet freedom in all of Asia. We believe the way to counter authoritarian influence is not by taking away freedom of speech, but by adding more context, ensuring everyone learns journalism, and providing numerous tools like the ...

Because the KYC requirement clearly targets actors rather than content, and because we achieved a broad consensus through our alignment assemblies (where we sent 200,000 random text message invitations for public deliberation), we found that over 85% of the public—regardless of age, party affiliation, gender, ethnicity, or place of residence—supported ...

In response to this civic deliberation, Taiwan last year became the first country in the world to require “Know Your Customer” (KYC) for all online advertisements. If Facebook runs an ad without KYC and someone is scammed out of five million dollars as a result, Facebook is not only fined ...

Therefore, we have shifted our defense focus from the “content level” to the “actor and behavior level.” For instance, last March, we held a civic deliberation on using AI to enhance information integrity. The main recommendation was that advertisements on social media—like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok—must carry a digital signature, ...

Precisely because it was hard to judge from content alone whether a message was a manipulation from Beijing or authentic, the work of discernment became increasingly difficult. In fact, due to the rise of AI and large language models, Europe is now facing the same challenge. In the past, you ...

In the past, a significant difference between European societies and Taiwan was the linguistic environment. The linguistic similarity across the Taiwan Strait is very high, so narratives from Beijing could be spread in Taiwan with only minor alterations and remixes, and people could easily understand them.

That is how, in 2014, I was invited to become a project consultant to the cabinet members of the time. After serving as a consultant for two years (because the rule for youth advisors—or reverse mentors—is that you have to be under 35), I became too old; I turned 35. ...

g0v started in 2012, and by 2014, I had already contributed to similar efforts for the multi-language version of the national dictionary and many other projects. But what really pushed g0v into the national consciousness was the three-week-long peaceful occupation of the legislature in March 2014. We ensured there was ...

I later became what is known as a “civic hacker,” which has nothing to do with cybersecurity. It’s about a movement called “g0v” (gov-zero), which creates open-source alternatives to existing government services. The basic idea of g0v is: for any government website (gov.tw) you don’t like, instead of protesting, you ...

I also remember how, in the living room of our home in Germany, my father’s research subjects—very young people in their twenties, exiled from Tiananmen—would come over to talk about democracy. Some of them eventually settled in Taiwan and taught at Taiwanese universities. And some of their students, in turn, ...

When I was 11, I lived in Saarland, Germany, for a year, near the French border. My father was pursuing his Ph.D. at Saarland University, and his dissertation was on the communication networks during the Tiananmen Square movement. He had been a journalist on the ground at Tiananmen until June ...

I believe this is identical to our experience in Taiwan. We also have populist politicians, but I think they too have become quite moderate over time. Furthermore, I believe “popular initiatives” are a hallmark of Switzerland, and we have our own citizen proposals on the national “Public Policy Network Participation ...

I just visited Switzerland not long ago (from May 20th to 23rd) and spoke with many people working on democracy at the Canton level, as well as political consultants. I think the common thread they pointed out to me is that because people feel a high degree of political engagement ...

This competency-based education empowers young people with a journalistic mindset. If you truly examine different sources, verify those sources, and construct a narrative, your mind becomes immune to manipulation and polarization.

This has had a huge impact on “pre-bunking”—that is, anticipating what kinds of manipulation, like deepfakes or election interference, might appear in the future, and teaching the entire society to recognize these techniques. It’s the exact same principle as a vaccine: introducing your immune system to something that looks like ...

Specifically, starting with our curriculum changes in 2019, we shifted the emphasis from “literacy” (about consuming media) to “competency” (the ability to co-create media). According to the ICCS (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study) report, by 2020, Taiwan’s middle school students ranked among the top in the world for civic ...

The remedy is “journalism.” By this, I don’t just mean professional journalists (who are, of course, very important) or professional fact-checkers in civil society (who are also crucial), but rather a “whole-of-society journalism.”

For example, I became a cabinet minister in October 2016, but by September, rumors were already circulating that I could control GPS satellites and that anyone who turned on their phone’s GPS could be controlled and monitored by me. There were many variations of this rumor, like if you installed ...

According to the V-Dem Institute, Taiwan has been the top target of this kind of foreign information manipulation for the past 12 years. So by now, I believe we have become very resilient, like having antibodies; our immune system is very robust. But when I first joined the cabinet in ...

This narrative can appear true in many democracies because they are becoming more polarized, populist narratives are gaining traction, and people do start to feel, “Oh, democracy really does just bring chaos.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If I had to single out the most dangerous message among the many, it would be this: “Democracy cannot deliver on its promises and only brings chaos.” In many democracies, because the social media environment favors engagement through polarization, you see more and more polarizing messages online. At the same ...

However, the situation is different now. In February of this year (2025), the Ministry of Digital Affairs opened up frequency bands to allow LEO satellite operators like Starlink, OneWeb, and others to use this spectrum. So if they were to apply now, I believe the ministry would review the application ...

I recall mentioning this publicly in a recorded interview. When a business partner visited, I proposed an innovative idea: perhaps if we granted the chairperson—that is, Elon Musk—dual Taiwanese citizenship, it might solve the problem. I was actually quite serious, as we were also promoting the Employment Gold Card and ...

Regarding why Starlink was not chosen initially, the reason is that when we started our planning in 2022, the Telecommunications Management Act at the time stipulated that if a telecom operator wanted to operate directly in Taiwan (rather than partnering with a Taiwanese telecom), its chairperson needed to have Taiwanese ...

As for my personal experience, when we were planning Taiwan’s communication resilience, we partnered with Europe’s SES and the UK’s OneWeb as our MEO and LEO satellite partners from the very beginning of the project.

The concept of a “non-Red supply chain” is quite similar to the “Clean Network” initiative that began during the first Trump administration. The core idea is to ensure that all the different parts of a telecommunications service, from end to end and up to the application layer, do not rely ...

So, for adults using their own phones and not within a government-operated space, there are currently no other restrictions besides those in the Anti-Fraud Special Act, which, for example, prohibits unsigned advertisements that could be part of a scam. In terms of anti-fraud measures, TikTok is subject to the same ...

When I was minister, I specifically highlighted this as the way forward and created my Threads account, engaging primarily there. I am happy to report that over the past few years, the use of Threads among young people has grown substantially, far outpacing the growth of TikTok. In fact, in ...

Finally, I want to point out that the state of Utah just passed a law, effective next July, that allows any Utah citizen to migrate their social media accounts—from TikTok, for example—to other platforms like Threads or Bluesky, and TikTok must preserve all their original followers, content, and data. This ...

In the United States, as you know, there is an ongoing negotiation to transition TikTok’s US operations into a new entity owned by American shareholders, rather than being directly or indirectly controlled by Beijing. I am still involved with the Project Liberty Institute as a Senior Fellow, where I am ...

When the Ministry of Digital Affairs was established in 2022, the first official document I signed extended the ban on products deemed a “harm to national cybersecurity,” such as TikTok, from the public sector to public venues operated or contracted by the government, like train stations. The use of such ...

If you were to ask someone on the street in Taiwan if Russia has launched attacks against Taiwan, they probably wouldn’t say so. It’s not a prevalent topic in our society; we rarely talk about Russia. Of course, among cybersecurity professionals, we sometimes discuss Russian cyberattacks or related technical issues. ...

I do believe that the outcome depends on ourselves. If we can ensure that the information manipulation, the attempts to sow division, and the narrative they want to project internationally—that “democracy is useless and only brings chaos”—do not gain traction, then I am confident the probability of military action will ...

I believe they are essentially testing our resilience. If we were to panic, if we failed to adapt and resist this manipulation and these cyberattacks—and cutting undersea cables counts as a denial-of-service attack—they would likely escalate their actions. So, my perspective is that this is a persistent threat. The only ...

We face millions of cyberattacks daily. This includes not just the security incidents we just discussed, but also information manipulation campaigns. Over the past year, there were approximately two million instances of information manipulation attacks. We know the PRC’s pressure on Taiwan is intensifying, with millions of cyberattacks and disinformation ...

One example is a project called “CyCraftGPT,” which is based on the Mistral model. It can understand cybersecurity incident reports and detect cyberattacks. It comprehends the Traditional Chinese used in these reports and can summarize the situation to coordinate defense efforts.

In language processing, we sometimes perform “distillation” and other times we fine-tune existing open-source models. I believe a very popular model in Taiwan is one based on France’s Mistral model, which was then fine-tuned with Traditional Chinese text to give it a better understanding of Taiwanese culture. So, the heavy ...

Yes, but we focus on training models for specific industries, not all-encompassing, general-purpose intelligence models. For example, we might train a cross-disciplinary model for quality control inspections in the manufacturing sector. But again, because it doesn’t contain content like movies, the model itself is quite small.

As for rare earth minerals and other raw materials, to my knowledge, Taiwan is actively working on finding substitutes and establishing efficient recycling mechanisms. Of course, we are more than willing to strengthen international cooperation on these fronts, but as this falls outside the scope of digital governance, I do ...

We believe, as I’ve said, that each industry and vertical should use tailored, moderately-sized, or “right-sized” models. In journalism, for example, you might need models for automated transcription and summarization. These models are small enough to run locally on your laptop, are not power-intensive, and don’t need to memorize every ...

Regarding the issue of electricity, I must emphasize that Taiwan has no intention of building a “super Stargate” to train massive models at a huge energy cost. Some are betting on hyperscale models, believing that if you train one with enough electricity, it will become self-aware—a single, giant entity that ...

Furthermore, as I mentioned in my written response, we attract talent with a history of open-source contributions through our “Employment Gold Card” program. The digital domain is a burgeoning field, and to date, the Gold Card has attracted over 13,000 foreign professionals with global work experience to reside in Taiwan. ...