Audrey Tang: The right honorable? No, just Audrey. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I prefer that.

Audrey Tang: Bubble tea, they know.

Audrey Tang: They know bubble tea.

Audrey Tang: It’s easy, actually. We just relaxed them, but yes.

Audrey Tang: We have a work visa for visiting business trip. We’re relaxing, I think, by the end of this month. The quarantine is also shortened from 14 days. We’re relaxing is what I’m saying.

Audrey Tang: When are you planning to record this?

Audrey Tang: End of this month.

Audrey Tang: This month, literally, next week begins the parliamentary interpellation.

Audrey Tang: If you have to get it done this month, I can accommodate as well with the local fixer and crew.

Audrey Tang: February 28th.

Audrey Tang: Not a day of lockdown. Very blessed.

Audrey Tang: I want to talk a little bit about copyrights. Usually I record at least my side of conversation or both sides with their consents to publish their transcript or the video, or both to the commons. Are you OK with that? Because if it is, it saves us a lot of time. If it’s not, I’ll have to arrange so that you can approve reverse questions.

Audrey Tang: I will paraphrase your questions so that I can get it into my transcript.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Audrey Tang: Even for today, what I will do is that I will make only my side, whatever I said public as a transcript or video. I want you to know that because it’s my protocol, but your image and your words will not be in it is what I’m saying.

Audrey Tang: Well. I wasn’t there. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In 1981. I remember the martial law and the democratic transition. ‘87, ‘89 that’s when I can’t give a firsthand account, everything else is hearsay.

Audrey Tang: ‘87, I believe.

Audrey Tang: I was six. My parents were both journalists. They had to sensor themselves a lot. There’s only the party, the one party. They could regularly see that their journalistic ideas, opinion pieces, in Taiwan, with the help of Taiwan international correspondents in Hong Kong [laughs] and the US to push Taiwan toward democratization.

Audrey Tang: At first illegal assembly of the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party – the current ruling party – was a staple in our dinner table and I was six. I remember a lot of that.

Audrey Tang: They’re in their 70s now. My mom, almost 70. They retired. They’re educators now. They’re still doing, I would say, journalistic analysis and things like that work. My dad was in Tiananmen, 1989. He covered it until June the 1st.

Audrey Tang: Then, he went to Berlin when the wall fell. His stories were about democratization around the globe, and less than from Taiwan in general. My dad would be somewhat very good to talk to. [laughs] He was there also in the ‘70s, I wasn’t.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that all I remember was Chiang Ching-kuo. His own authoritarian style.

Audrey Tang: As of Chiang Kai-shek and throughout white terror, I wasn’t part of it. My generation remember that because we still have the martial law memories. We see the artifacts of the frankly speaking fascism there, but we’re less directly impacted by it.

Audrey Tang: People younger than me in their 30s, they don’t remember even the Chiang Ching-kuo days. People have very different memories …

Audrey Tang: From a distance, things can seem quite romantic. But white terror was felt as extremely painful.

Audrey Tang: We see that in many discussions like the electronic ID card discussions. People who have been in white terror, remember the white terror, think of it as something that’s terrible.

Audrey Tang: The younger generation – 30s or younger – who were born into universal health care, which uses the IC card, remember that as convenient and cool.

Audrey Tang: Very different sentiments.

Audrey Tang: On the street then way when I was 8 or 12. My mom was also one of the early initiators of the Consumer Coop Pro-Environmental Movement.

Audrey Tang: Everyone saw it coming by, is from one constitutional court ruling and two referendums. It’s also a story of democratic progress. Also, the innovation within the public service for more than 12 years of gender mainstreaming work started from VP Annette Lu Hsiu-lien. It rides on the feminist gender mainstreaming work of a previous generation.

Audrey Tang: We’ve already progress to a point where Dr. Tsai Ing-wen as president also symbolizes. She’s not there because she’s anyone’s daughter or any politician’s wife. She was there, entirely on merit. With more than 40 percent parliamentary seats for women… of course, we can do better but it’s not bad in Asia.

Audrey Tang: It’s already a pretty good fabric on top of which the marriage equality can be deliberated in a reasonable fashion that also honors the traditions of our more than 20 national languages and their family traditions.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Of course.

Audrey Tang: They get physical. Yes.

Audrey Tang: I was there when they threw those pork intestines. [laughs] I was coding, writing an essay, and reading students’ feedback on my laptop, completely oblivious. [laughs] I was on the front seat. [laughs] It’s very performative.

Audrey Tang: I joked in a very popular talk show, that maybe it’s easier if we can get the avatars. They may have all the MPs modeled so they can do even more stunts, flying, and things like that. [laughs] That completes their performance without having to make the parliamentary floor dirty.

Audrey Tang: After the camera turns off, the journalists leave, they went together into a bar together or something. It is entirely performative.

Audrey Tang: Chi Chia-wei. Sure.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know him personally. The importance is that the constitutional ruling because of his persistence, it changed the conversation when the LGBTIQA+ movements rallying around Chi Chia-wei that this change need to be done.

Audrey Tang: It’s done in a way that doesn’t actually alienate the family-to-family relationships. Because in Taiwan, the configuration is different. We don’t have that much of a religious opposition. There are some, but mostly, there is a sense of the state should not interfere into kinship relationships. Because before 2007, people could just have a public ceremony. They don’t register, but it’s legally a marriage.

Audrey Tang: They just register after the fact like birth certificate. The idea here is the family-to-family relationship see the young people wedding as young as 16, not an adult, as representatives of the family.

Audrey Tang: They don’t want that lineage family kinship thinking to be broken by allowing marriage equality. I think one of the key contributions of the strategies that they were doing at the time was that they’re – what’s the English word? – eclectic.

Audrey Tang: In the US, as I understand that a key argument point is that it’s love is love, and marriage is marriage.

Audrey Tang: I think the Taiwan conversation goes like this. It’s OK to say that it’s a wedding, a union between two individuals. We want the same rights and duties by law, but we don’t necessarily need the in-law, father-in-law, mother-in-law part of the equation. That changes the dynamic so much so that people converge on a shared understanding.

Audrey Tang: Now, I’m not saying that this is attributable to Chi Chia-wei, but Chi Chia-wei stands during this legalizing the by-law and not in-law, the two referenda, and so on was stable enough, consistent enough, so that right after the legalization, we don’t see people going to the streets. It’s actually quite convergent.

Audrey Tang: It’s a really good story because otherwise in other countries, we’ve seen some flip-flopping, people mobilizing on the streets, and so on. In Taiwan, it’s converging quickly.

Audrey Tang: The referendums helped. One referendum said just don’t put it in the Civil Code. Don’t call it family. Another referendum says it’s entirely OK to have exactly the same rights and duties. The two result basically, in addition to the court ruling, the solution’s base is a single point.

Audrey Tang: I was there only for a few hours, live tweeting. Because I brought them the supply of Ethernet cables of network, once that was wired up I watched safely from a live stream distance, from the streets around the parliament.

Audrey Tang: The point of that was to learn from previous Occupy Movements. I’ve read and translated part of Manuel Castells’ book — among others — on the previous wave of Occupy movements.

Audrey Tang: It seemed to me there was no effective way for the millions of people on the street to converge on a set of coherent demands. It’s then easier for the drama for the conspiracy theories and so on to go viral than the ideas that resonates with people to go viral.

Audrey Tang: My contribution with the g0v Community is through live streaming. Even people safely from online can feel they are part of the conversation and also monitor the conversation.

Audrey Tang: If there’s violence anywhere and so on, it gets detected very quickly, so it became a safe space for civic deliberation. When that went on for three weeks, we did agree on things, and these were ratified, so the Occupy was a successful demonstration sense of demo.

Audrey Tang: The demonstrators were demonstrating a more deliberative way of talking about the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement. The Trade in Service Agreement, the CSSTA was rushed through by the Parliament without substantial deliberation, as would fit a normal international treaty. It’s at that time interpreted as not strictly international, and the public hearings were not inclusive enough, and the ideas were not being taken into account. It was seen as just a formal process. There’s no line-by-line deliberation of alternatives, and so on.

Audrey Tang: People didn’t like the fact that it could be rushed through. Then people just occupied a place of the MPs because they were on strike in substantial deliberations [laughs] that people showed how they would do that if they were given the room.

Audrey Tang: I think the impetus — and I can only speak personally — was because I supported live streaming for pro-unification camps and also pro de jure independence camps and everyone in between.

Audrey Tang: Around the parliament, there’s concurrent deliberations from all those different takes.

Audrey Tang: There were corners, of course, as you mentioned, that worry about increased integration, but there’s another corner that worries about the cybersecurity implication of allowing so-called private sector from PRC in our 4G telecom infrastructure, a conversation that would have in other places in the world a few years later around 5G.

Audrey Tang: People care about the things that they care about. You can’t really put an umbrella term and say that they’re there because they are afraid of more integration. People show up in different corners because they care about different things.

Audrey Tang: If you google “digital minister”, you’ll find quite a few people, like Karen Makishima. Karen in Japan is also a digital minister, so I have counterparts.

Audrey Tang: In some countries like France, there’s the digital ambassador, which is also something part of my job. I’m also a minister in the lower case sense of preaching value-based democracy networking. All these are part of my job. If you search for digital ambassadors, there’s even more, like in Australia and so on.

Audrey Tang: The road to that was because right after the Occupy, there’s a national forum on economic and trade affairs.

Audrey Tang: On the forum, people’s consensus was that if we don’t like the parliament being occupied all the time, we probably should have a digital acropolis for people to have that conversation online instead of physically so that we can get the same reasonable draft consensus without actually resorting to physical occupying.

Audrey Tang: How to do that? At the end of 2014, I was invited as a reverse mentor. People under 35 who advise Cabinet members over 35, which is all of us. Then as a reverse mentor, I help designing the vTaiwan process for a couple years. Then after Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became president, I get promoted in literally the same office.

Audrey Tang: It’s like an intern for two years and then promoted full-time.

Audrey Tang: I have my job description pinned to my Twitter. [laughs] My Twitter account is @audreyt and there is actually my job description pinned there, but if you want to have it on the record, I can read my job description.

Audrey Tang: OK. It goes like this, “When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.”

Audrey Tang: It’s a wordplay because plurality, plural and digital in Taiwan is the same two characters: 數位. I’m also a plural minister, if you will.

Audrey Tang: I’m a poetician, yes. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: My work, broadly speaking, we talked a little bit about democracy networking, not just internationally, but also people-to-people, civic tech, the pluriverse, the web 3.0 communities, the smart planet, communities, talking to rivers, and not metaphorically, and so on. So that’s one part of democracy networking.

Audrey Tang: I also work on inclusive innovation, through broadband as human rights, media competency in the basic education curriculum which I helped design, and the more mundane government services like vaccine registration, things like that.

Audrey Tang: Data governance, of course, both on open data, and also making sure data don’t over centralize, which is a hot topic now.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know about the “re-“. There was not any time where it was unified. I take issue with the “re-“, I guess. Otherwise, I just posted an interview that I did in 2019. Also, there’s one with Deutsche Welle. That was around these particular issues. If you want to, just look at it a little bit.

Audrey Tang: I’m trying to find a one that I said Taiwan broke apart in the Neolithic Age. Here it is, which is a geological factor, by the way. Two interviews for your context.

Audrey Tang: To me, it’s about bubble tea… I had a quite viral Twitter video about bubble and tea like digital and democracy. [laughs] That tells the story of open innovation.

Audrey Tang: To me, it’s more outbound, because identity, of course, is part of that. There’s also a lot of intersectionality, the kind of progress that we made from the plural viewpoints and so on are proving, for example, the marriage equality that we just talked about, proved to be hugely inspirational for the rest of Asia, as well as Indo-Pacific.

Audrey Tang: It’s a story also of the Taiwanese diaspora, the talent circulation, and things like that. I wouldn’t say it’s just about identity. I think there’s a meme of being “also Taiwanese”, which is actually true because we offer dual citizenships. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: You can all be a e-resident and also not just “e-“ because it’s a full resident card, by applying for Taiwan Gold Card without renouncing your passport. What I’m trying to say is that identity is quite plural here. [laughs] Feel free to be also Taiwanese.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think that’s because we’re caught between the Eurasian plate and the Philippine Sea plate. We have earthquakes all the time, like literally very large one around turn of the century. That made people band together. There’s a lot of solidarity in social sector work.

Audrey Tang: The legitimacy of social sector is higher than the public sector because of the constant need to help each other in typhoons and earthquakes and other natural disasters. That’s part of it.

Audrey Tang: When I was in Portugal, in Lisbon, I’ve heard a similar story. Because of that, people learn to work with their differences and ideologically too. When you mentioned that there’s this ideological from the Eurasian side and from the Pacific side, we tend to be non-binary.

Audrey Tang: That is to say we take both and then we strive to create something like the marriage equality innovation that is good enough for all sorts of people and the continued success of that, like maintaining privacy and freedom of movement while squashing Omicron. The continued success reinforces this feeling that we can always find something that’s co-creative.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know whether it’s threatening there. Have you spoken to people in Beijing? Personally, I think it’s very inspirational.

Audrey Tang: But it is true. It is true. The Taiwan model, the way that we spread Dr. Li Wenliang message around the turn of the year in the first day of 2020 when Dr. Li Wenliang’s message about the seven SARS cases in the Wuhan seafood market, resulted in us taking the measures that we did publicly, transparently, on the first day of 2020.

Audrey Tang: That was really inspirational for other places because in Wuhan, Dr. Li Wenliang got harmonized, punished by police. His message couldn’t get out, which could have prevented the initial outbreak.

Audrey Tang: I said poetician.

Audrey Tang: It’s an Icelandic innovation. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who’s in the Pirate Party there called herself because she was a poet like I was before joining the cabinets. [laughs] It requires poeticians.

Audrey Tang: I was having another interview with the “Art of Power” podcast. I said it’s the power of art. It’s not about the coercive violent power; it’s not about the power that takes away things or power that denies information. It is the power about conviviality, of non-binary, so to speak, plurality.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I’m part of Premier’s Cabinet meeting every Thursday. Thursday and Monday, I go to the Cabinet office. In other days, I can telework. I’m teleworking and touring around Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: When I was young, there was this whole rote memorization stereotype of Asian overachievers [laughs] that you’re probably all very familiar with. As we democratized, there’s a veritable movement that calls for alternative education.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is the best in Asia, if not the world, in that up to 10 percent of our students can be homeschooled, alternatively educated, things like that. There’s a lot of experimentation around all different educational methods. Personally, I was homeschooled since I was 15.

Audrey Tang: That resulted in many working models like research labs took into our basic curriculum. In basic curriculum, for example, we don’t talk about media literacy or data literacy anymore. We talk about competence, meaning that you make and remix things that have an immediate effect on your community, like measuring air quality.

Audrey Tang: Students can fact-check our three presidential candidates that they’re having a debate. All these pot people, it doesn’t matter that they’re not yet 18. They can be an active part of democracy. Democracy is only as good as how much people put their time to improve it. I think that is very important.

Audrey Tang: We have a counselor of the National Commission on the action plan for open government, Ms. Wang Xuan-Ru, who is 19. When she was 17, her civics class assignment is to go and make a viral petition. She thought about banning plastic straws from Bubble Tea takeouts because there was a sea turtle choking environment at the time. It resulted in policy change.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that if you have a lot of good examples and experience before they turn 18, then they understand democracy is something that they’re all part of.

Audrey Tang: What if there’s no Taiwan? Then the other narrative — that you have to compromise privacy and human right in order to fight the pandemic — the narrative could win.

Audrey Tang: Of course, New Zealand is not doing too bad in the past couple of years, and here Taiwan is another proof of existence, a proof of concept, that you don’t have to see, as you just said, a zero-sum trade-off between fundamental values.

Audrey Tang: The US, if I may, the great American experiment is about learning from such ideological divisions and innovating something that can make the next generation proud. Each generation learns from the previous.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, because we are digitally competent and universal health care and all those social and technological fabrics, is a great lab for the future of democracy. If Taiwan is gone, then it’s difficult in Asia, other than Japan and South Korea, to find a lab of this sort.

Audrey Tang: At the Social Innovation Lab, that’s my preferred place. It’s literally a public park that used to be an Air Force headquarters. It speaks a lot about democratic transitions and the sound ambience and everything is really good.

Audrey Tang: One of the things that I can offer you is that I’ll send you the TaiwanPlus episode about my work in the Social Innovation Lab, so that you can see whether it’s environmentally fit for your atmosphere. We do a lot of filming there.

Audrey Tang: The protocol. Yes. I’m just pasting my protocol here.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.