Peter Harmsen: This is Peter.

Audrey Tang: Hello, this is Audrey Tang from Taiwan.

Peter Harmsen: Oh, hi.

Audrey Tang: Greetings.

Peter Harmsen: Good. Thank you very much for taking time out to talk.

Audrey Tang: No problem at all. You can hear me just fine, right?

Peter Harmsen: Yeah, how about me?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it works for me too.

Peter Harmsen: Oh, thanks so much. I’m very grateful that you have time to talk at such short notice. I was wondering how much time do we have?

Audrey Tang: Maybe three hours, but I don’t think you’ll use all three hours.

Peter Harmsen: No, probably not. Actually, I was thinking about the three different issue areas I would like to talk about if you have time. The first one would be, more specifically, about the election and how, for example, the Chinese interference in the form of fake news might impact the election?

Peter Harmsen: Secondly, if you have the time, maybe talk about the philosophies that you pursue as a minister. Then, finally, more about your personal, specifically, your own background, and your own experience as a transgender person in politics. Would that be OK?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Certainly, we can allocate one hour for each topic at maximum.

Peter Harmsen: My first question is, looking at the Taiwan elections from the outside, it seems that Tsai Ing-wen’s chances of reelection have increased dramatically compared with a year ago. What do you think are the main reasons for that?

Audrey Tang: I think one of the main reasons is that this election, for the first time, is centered around a real case of the “One country, two systems,” as it played out in Hong Kong. It’s quite rare. Actually, the first time that I remember that all the different presidential candidates take the same stance against Hong Kong.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, to support their core demand to determine for their own governing mechanism, the general election. That is the fifth demand. I think because the election always shaped this way and Dr. Tsai was the first one who so ardently support Hong Kong, the other candidates followed her. That gave her a lead in the agenda-setting.

Peter Harmsen: Even though she had the lead in this particular issue, the fact that all three candidates pretty much agree on this, doesn’t that almost cancel it out?

Audrey Tang: They eventually agreed on this, but Dr. Tsai was very consistent from the very beginning. When I say having the lead, I didn’t mean in the polls, I mean in the agenda-setting.

Peter Harmsen: Now that the Hong Kong unrest has been going on for more than six months now – seven, eight months already – and it’s not really news any longer, is it still something that impacts the election in Taiwan to the same extent?

Audrey Tang: As I said, this is not about only Hong Kong, but rather about the limitation of the Hong Kong “one country, two system” model.

Audrey Tang: Because the “one country, two system” model was something that people in Taiwan very vehemently disagreed for this particular election, this creates an atmosphere in which that Dr. Tsai Ing-wen stands against the “one country, two system” is seen as more prominent.

Audrey Tang: Whereas the other candidates followed on this agenda. This is not just about the protests. I didn’t mean the anti-ELAB protest. I mean the “one country, two system” agenda.

Peter Harmsen: Just thinking about that, even though one country, two systems has been part of the political lingo for decades, now, we actually see what it means in practice?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, and the limitation of what it means in practice.

Peter Harmsen: It seems that every Taiwanese presidential election is fundamentally about China and the relationship to China. Every other issue – the environment or same-sex marriage – it becomes secondary and really recedes into the background. Is it just the way it is in Taiwan that basically everything comes down to China?

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say everything. Especially now we’re going to have elections and referendum in alternating years. It will be about the referendum topic the next year, because we no longer tie the referendum to elections. I would say that it’s not everything is about the presidential election.

Audrey Tang: Your observation, I think, confirms many people’s understanding that during the presidential elections, indeed, the PRC relationship is almost one of the highest if not the highest agenda.

Peter Harmsen: Do you think that’s going to change any time soon?

Audrey Tang: You mean like in four years?

Peter Harmsen: Maybe looking a bit in the future, do you think China will almost perennially be the top issue in Taiwan politics?

Audrey Tang: That’s a really good question. As I said, we did not have the mechanism of the citizens setting the referendum subjects until the previous one, which is not so long ago. At that time, it’s also tied to an election. It’s the same day.

Audrey Tang: The agenda still revolves around the election topics, not quite the referenda topics, which you compared to the PRC issue. What I’m trying to say is that after this election, there will be an entire year where the agenda will be set around the referendum subjects without any ties to the days of election.

Audrey Tang: We will see whether those agenda set by the referendum petitioners and collective conversations from the civil society can reach a more deep set of deliberation that is not relevant as much in the previous referenda, because they were tied to the election day.

Peter Harmsen: Turning to the present election, there has been a lot of reports in the media about the fake news, probably most of it originating from mainland China. How serious is this issue of fake news and misinformation?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we only say disinformation here. At least in the administration, we don’t use the “fake” “news” term, because in Taiwan, journalism and news are translated into the same Mandarin word, [Mandarin] . Because of that, it’s impossible to say “fake news” without it sounding like an affront to journalism, so we don’t use that translation.

Audrey Tang: But we do say disinformation, disinformation meaning intentional, harmful untruths that harms the public – not just the image of a politician, but the public – is indeed a perennial issue in democracies.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, because broadband is a human right, it makes it even more multimedia, whereas in other jurisdictions before the advent of the unlimited 4G connection at only €16 per month, it’s mostly just textual or occasionally pictures, but now it’s live streaming, it’s video, and everybody can become a broadcaster, which makes the information and media landscape much more multi-modal.

Audrey Tang: This decade, I think, is about more and more sophisticated ways to spread such intentional, harmful untruths.

Peter Harmsen: If you compare with the presidential election four years ago, has it become a more salient issue?

Audrey Tang: I would say that compared to four years ago, this time people are more aware that there is such an issue, that there is a name, disinformation, that there is a mechanism, namely society reached into the social sector and traditional institutional journalists, they collaborated on the fact checking mechanisms. All these were not ready and not in place four years ago.

Audrey Tang: In this particular election, we’re seeing that the institutional media and the social sector volunteers are collaborating much more deeply with a very firm understanding of the disinformation issue at hand.

Peter Harmsen: Do you have any estimate, how much of this disinformation originates in mainland China?

Audrey Tang: I would say that there are certain pieces of this disinformation that could be clearly attributed because it started from a certain Weibo account, for example, but there are also a lot of remixes, meaning that people looking at such information packages and remix it in a domestic context.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost not possible to quantify because a lot of it goes into encrypted channels, meaning that it is unavailable for outside analysis. I would say there are certain pieces of disinformation that we know for sure that originates from the PRC.

Peter Harmsen: Can you give a particularly gross example of disinformation originating from the PRC from recent weeks?

Audrey Tang: If you can take a look at the Taiwan fact-checking center, they have plenty of examples of such attribution. I will just use one example. There were a post circulating around that says – I wish I can pronounce those air quotes more visibly – but here goes.

Audrey Tang: There is a website article that says, “The rioters in Hong Kong have their payments exposed murdering police is rewarded by up to $20 million.”

Audrey Tang: If you’re curious, that’s the number 204 on the Taiwan fact-checking center.

Peter Harmsen: I will have a look.

Audrey Tang: I can send it to you via email. The point here is that this piece is good because the attribution is pretty complete. They attributed the original post to a Weibo account by the Central Commission of the PRC unit around politics and law, so we know for sure that it came from there.

Peter Harmsen: I heard some of the disinformation from China is fairly unsophisticated and it even uses simplified characters, so you can immediately see where it’s from. Is that correct and do you also see some pretty unsophisticated methods like that?

Audrey Tang: In the particular case that I just sent you by email, which I alluded to, the disinformation allegedly contained a Telegram group of the Hong Kong protestors but they were using the [foreign language] , which is the Romanization method used in the PRC but not in Hong Kong, which is primarily Cantonese.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say it’s unsophisticated. I would say that they maybe were not aware of the cultural context involved.

Peter Harmsen: Is there also disinformation arising from other sources, like, for example, the United States…?

Audrey Tang: As I said, the Internet is all about remixing, so whatever catches the virality, the interest of the reader, usually provoking outrage from a sense of anger – it’s like a chain email – tends to have its content remixed and modified and so on.

Audrey Tang: I would say that, unless the attribution is very clearly to a state-sponsored or a state-blessed actor, we don’t usually say it’s from a single jurisdiction because it’s, literally, made in the world, [laughs] meaning that people remix along their distribution.

Peter Harmsen: I was just wondering if people say that Taiwan is becoming like an online battleground between opposing forces in China and the United States, maybe a fight for the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people?

Audrey Tang: This is the first time that I’ve seen, or heard, in this case, this way to put it. I don’t know the source but I would say that Taiwan is a transcultural Republic, and so we do look at the different cultural sources in a way that respects each other’s culture but there’s, of course, also, a lot of cultural differences among the people here.

Audrey Tang: I would say that it is not just the two worldviews that you alluded to. There’s also, for example, the Austronesian lineages, the indigenous people. There are, also, new immigrants coming from Indo-Pacific backgrounds.

Audrey Tang: There’s, now, many Taiwanese people that are from, like, Ukraine, [laughs] from all around the world that are, nevertheless, going to vote very quickly, in a week, now. Taiwan is home to many lineages. It is certainly true that these lineages are not always agree on each other and there are some tensions.

Peter Harmsen: Taiwan is becoming a multi-cultural society?

Audrey Tang: Transcultural. Just this year, we passed a new language act that made around 20 languages international languages. Previously, four years ago, we only had one national language, Mandarin, so that is certainly the direction we’re heading.

Peter Harmsen: I know I’m moving a bit off-topic now but I was wondering, do you think that maybe Taiwan could even be a model of a multi-cultural society also, like places like Europe, where we also are having our struggles with multi-culturalism these years?

Audrey Tang: I do think so. If you look at, for example, the issues around marriage equality, around gender equality, and things like that, Taiwan definitely leads all of Asia, while several items were not quite Nordic.

Audrey Tang: For example, we only have around 40 percent women in Parliament. Certainly not the world’s best. It compares very favorably around Asia.

Peter Harmsen: Do you think that the West is sufficiently aware of these progressive values that come out of Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: I think after Dr. Tsai’s winning the election and the marriage equality act that was passed, people are becoming more and more aware that Taiwan really is a multi-cultural and quite liberal, in a classic sense, quite a liberal society.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan could work more on this international image, but certainly, we’re doing much better in the past couple years now.

Peter Harmsen: If Tsai wins the election, which seems very likely, is that something that will be pushed in the next four years, internationally?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, that’s one of her campaign promises. One of her campaign programs is essentially spreading more of the idea that Taiwan can help. That is to say, Taiwan is not only looking at multiculturalism as our strength but rather spreading this model of classical liberal democracy around Asia as well.

Peter Harmsen: How could that work in practice, this spread of Taiwanese values to other societies, nations?

Audrey Tang: There’s many ways. One of the ways is increasing our participation in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have adopted the SDGs not only a national level with our own voluntary national review as well as our SDG plan, but municipalities – Taipei, New Taipei, and very soon, Taoyuan – are also contributing into their voluntary local reviews or VLRs, something started by New York City. Taiwan is very early to join.

Audrey Tang: Through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, we engage the global multistakeholder society, that is to say, not only the traditional multi-laterals but rather form mini-laterals around specific SDGs that people care about.

Audrey Tang: For example, when we talk about disinformation, counter-disinformation, we use the Global Cooperation and Training Framework to ensure that everybody agreeing to SDG 16 – which is a accessible and representative institutions, protecting human rights and free speech – to bond together.

Audrey Tang: Now it is jointly hosted by Japan, by Taiwan, and the US, and with dozens of other countries sending people, usually journalists, to learn about the ways Taiwan worked with journalists instead of against journalists when it comes to mitigating disinformation online. That’s just one of the 17 SDGs that we’re working on.

Audrey Tang: We are also running a event called the Presidential Hackathon where the president highlights five specific SDG targets every year, as crowdsourced by people who think about novel ways to achieve those SDG targets, and commit to bind herself to realize people’s solutions, five teams every year, into the national strategy within 12 months.

Audrey Tang: All these ways are not just domestic, but we also invite international teams. The previous winners in last year’s Presidential Hackathon in the international track were Honduras and Malaysia, if I’m not mistaken. Many countries did join. If you look for Presidential Hackathon, you can find a lot of the global goals, related target, and endeavors.

Peter Harmsen: Could we say that this is a source of Taiwanese soft power in the world?

Audrey Tang: Of course, if you say, “Taiwan can help.” Around here, we say [Mandarin] , or warm power, [laughs] to be literal. The idea, of course, this is soft power. This is cultural power.

Peter Harmsen: Is it a problem that China is doing so much to isolate Taiwan in the world? Does that make it more difficult for Taiwan to use this soft power?

Audrey Tang: Not for me, personally, no. I don’t feel that. I participate in 2017 International Governance Forum on the Internet, the UN IGF in UN Geneva as a robot across the distance. I also attended the UN Sustainable Development Solution Network, multiple meetings, UN ESCAP, UN-Habitat, many venues.

Audrey Tang: A key thing here is that all the venues that I attended were multistakeholder or multistakeholder and multilateral hybrid panels where I joined from the multistakeholder side. While the PRC is, as you put it, excluding or isolating the multilateral platforms, because they also sign on the SDGs for the Sustainable Goals, they couldn’t quite do so on the multistakeholder forums.

Peter Harmsen: The reason why China is not an obstacle is because China is not able to prevent Taiwan’s participation?

Audrey Tang: That is exactly right. In a multistakeholder forum, it is not about a state representative representing certain area or a territory. This is about the stakeholder groups or major groups, to use the UN terms, who care about a certain issue or a set of community that gets affected, such as people who risk their habitation to climate change and so on.

Audrey Tang: They all have a seat at the table, and they re-present their actual contributions, worries, and solutions, without being a state representative, to talk on behalf of them. The former is called multistakeholder, and the latter, multilateral.

Peter Harmsen: Are you concerned that China, either directly or indirectly, eventually will find ways to also constrain Taiwanese international participation overseas in these fora?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think that could happen because a multistakeholder forum, for example, the Internet multistakeholder forums, people can join using Internet connections, teleconferencing. Anybody who has a email can join the working group.

Audrey Tang: It is quite unlikely that the PRC can systemically remove the email accounts or the video-conferencing accounts from anybody dialing in from Taiwan because we do have our own Internet domain that is .tw. It is quite unlikely that the PRC can manage to take .tw out from the international Internet domain ICANN registry.

Peter Harmsen: I want to return briefly to the topic of disinformation. When we talk about the Chinese disinformation on Taiwan, it’s usually about the Chinese people sending bits of disinformation to the Taiwanese public through various channels.

Peter Harmsen: I was wondering, is there any evidence of Chinese disinformation regarding Taiwan in third countries, for example, in Europe?

Audrey Tang: Let me check my understanding of your question. You’re asking whether we are aware that the PRC is spreading disinformation also to European countries?

Peter Harmsen: Yeah, regarding Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: There is, of course, notable cases such as telling the World Health Organization that they can represent the interests of the Taiwanese community when it comes to epidemics really well. They can protect the health of people in Taiwan by “representing” Taiwan’s interests in the World Health Assembly.

Audrey Tang: That certainly is a piece of intentional untruth, and it does harm the public – public health in this particular case.

Peter Harmsen: Is Taiwan doing anything actively to try and counteract this?

Audrey Tang: In the previous World Health Assembly, there’s not only a lot of bilateral and mini-lateral meetings around the main assembly, but there’s also a concerted effort of public diplomacy from the civil society as well as the public sector to spread the idea that Taiwan can help. If you search for “Taiwan can help WHA,” you will probably find various creative attempts.

Peter Harmsen: I would like to turn to your philosophies as a minister at the head of a major bureaucracy. First of all, you’ve mentioned that broadband is a human right. I wondered if you could elaborate on that

Audrey Tang: Certainly. In Taiwan, anywhere in Taiwan, it could be 4,000 meters high – the Yushan Mountain, almost 4,000 meters – you still have 10 megabits per second, very affordable, €15-per-month connection via 4G or via broadband through fiber optics, cable, or even satellite.

Audrey Tang: That is a universal access promise. I think the coverage is now more than 98 percent. The active users above 12 years are now around 90 percent. It means that if anywhere in Taiwan you cannot have access affordably to broadband, that is my fault.

Peter Harmsen: Is that something that you think should be a human right, universally, for all mankind?

Audrey Tang: I would think that is a Sustainable Development Goal, yes. To be very specific, that’s part of SDG 9.c, if I’m not mistaken.

Peter Harmsen: Why is it a human right? Why is it so important?

Audrey Tang: The information and communication technology increasingly become the public forum around which democracies are formed and democracies are performed.

Audrey Tang: To systemically exclude people from the digital information and communication or to restrict people to a asymmetric mode, that is to say, television and radio, which allows for broadcasting, meaning one person to speak to millions of people but not listening, which is a million people listening to one another, decimates these people’s participation into a democratic everyday life.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about the political democracy. It’s also about democracy when it comes to opportunities of development, education, and so on.

Peter Harmsen: In this particular area, it would seem that China is also very progressed. There’s almost universal access to the Internet.

Audrey Tang: They also sign on the Global Goals. Anyone who [laughs] sign on the Global Goals agree that the target 9.c is a good idea. 9.c is scheduled to be delivered on 2020. Of course, I would say that it is a universal good that people consider target 9.c a very important one.

Peter Harmsen: Of course, broadband, it’s a two-way street. It can also be used to indoctrinate people. Is it a risk that it can be abused by governments? What can be done about that?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, in Taiwan, when we say broadband is a human right, we mean that everybody has access to the affordable broadband to become a media by themself. We talk about how people can spread the ideas that they think is correct, also listen to the different viewpoints that they may consider incorrect and the tension from it, and resolving those tensions through democratic debate.

Audrey Tang: If everybody is potentially media, that means that the state, the government, is made more and more transparent to the people. People can ask, just like people who practice journalism, various investigative questions and crowdsource their investigation into how the state works.

Audrey Tang: By transparency, we mean the state is becoming more and more transparent to the people through broadband. Of course, as you probably, implicitly alluded to, there are also jurisdictions on which they use broadband to make the citizens transparent to the state.

Peter Harmsen: I saw you quoted elsewhere saying that governments must be transparent to the citizens, but the other way around, there’s no…

Audrey Tang: It’s not our philosophy to make…It’s not just about privacy. It’s also about people’s right to fiduciary control on who they trust to process their data. It is also about people’s way to form coalitions or data collaboratives that, together, pool around their data. All this disappears of the state posed itself as a single intermediary, as in the so-called “social credit” system.

Peter Harmsen: Could we also rephrase it as saying the citizens have a right to monitor the government, but the government does not necessarily have a right to monitor its citizens?

Peter Harmsen: Is that a correct way to phrase it?

Audrey Tang: The idea of liberal democracy in the very beginning is that the government is accountable, meaning that we need to provide an account. Citizens are only held accountable if they are performing public functions.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, if they’re not performing public functions, there is no legitimacy from the state to ask a democracy to hold individuals accountable for the non-public-sector performing actions that they make. Of course, that’s a core liberal democracy, and I understand not all jurisdictions are liberal democracies.

Peter Harmsen: I’m asking because in Europe we almost see the opposite trend. We see government officials being more and more keen to look into the private matters of citizens at the same time as they’ve perhaps become less transparent than they were before, sometimes with reference to the need to counteract, for example, terrorism.

Peter Harmsen: What would you say to officials in the West who say that we need to keep an eye on our citizens in order to prevent there being terrorist attacks?

Audrey Tang: Each jurisdiction is facing a different configuration of society. I would not give unsolicited advice. For example, it’s physically difficult to reach Taiwan. We are, after all, a bunch of islands. It’s hard to accidentally be here. Because of that, our configuration around border policy and so on is naturally different from jurisdictions where the borders are more easily accessible.

Audrey Tang: I would not extend our experience blindly to other jurisdictions. I would, of course, say that each democracy need to sufficiently deliberate with its informed citizenry on such policy issues.

Peter Harmsen: You’ve been in your current position three years and two months, as far as I understand?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Peter Harmsen: Is there one particular piece of policy that you can point to that has been particularly instrumental in promoting this goal of making broadband a human right, to turn that into reality?

Audrey Tang: The configuration here, I would say, first, I’m not taking credit of that policy. It’s Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s presidential promise, after all. I would not take credit for the fact that it’s €16 or 499 NT$ per month because that is an accident between the telecoms. If you search for “499 Taiwan mobile fee,” you will find the whole story. I’m not [laughs] taking credit of all of these.

Audrey Tang: I will, however, say that people do find the broadband access important to participate in day-to-day democracy. That is to say, democracy between elections and between referendums in our petition platforms, our regulatory pre-announcement platform, in our budget visualization and participatory budget platform.

Audrey Tang: Which is the same website, join.gov.tw, which counts 10 million visitors in Taiwan, which is interesting because Taiwan has 23 million people, so a large fraction of people.

Audrey Tang: I would perhaps say that the open government work that we have put in place gave people one of the best around the world chances to see, transparently, how government works and initiate cross-ministerial issues for the ministers to talk about without having to go through election and elected representatives. That did make broadband access more valuable, but it’s certainly not the only reason.

Peter Harmsen: Do you think the Taiwan experience could help pointing the way towards how the Internet could be a force for democracy in China?

Audrey Tang: It could be a model of democracies everywhere. I think we are offering this to the whole community of homo sapiens, that is to say, humankind.

Peter Harmsen: If you look narrowly at China, do you see the Internet as a force for democracy there?

Audrey Tang: The thing is that Internet, as originally designed, relies on the freedom to innovate without a middle box, without a middle point.

Audrey Tang: Arguably, in the past couple years especially, people in PRC, through the Great Firewall as well as many other institutional design, is turning the Internet there through their management of VPN and management of cryptography, devising an alternate norm of what they call “cyber-sovereignty,” which is their alternative norm to the Internet norm.

Audrey Tang: It is interesting to see whether they would remain part of the core Internet with this norm or whether they will close more and more of the core Internet protocols beneath or behind the Great Firewall and eventually becoming, essentially, a intranet. The trend is moving slowly toward that direction. Of course, we don’t know how long it will take to reach that point.

Peter Harmsen: Given China’s record over the past several years in the area, are you basically optimistic or pessimistic regarding the Internet as a force for democracy in China?

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say here is that Internet by itself is decentralized. It decentralizes innovation. People around the world, whether they’re in, say, Hong Kong or whether they’re in Taiwan, as long as there is free Internet access, people can innovate on new social technologies, that is to say, new ways to move around existing social configurations and mobilize people in a different way.

Audrey Tang: We see this very clearly in the so-called “be water” principal in Hong Kong during their anti-ELAB protests. As long as there are still such room for permissionless innovation, I’m optimistic around its democratic potentials.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if such room for innovation is taken away, then, of course, democracy on the Internet risks to be choked. The space for such innovations may no longer be there if, for example, people are forced to be face-recognition finger-printed every time they use the Internet.

Peter Harmsen: Is there anything the outside world should do about this? Should we just let that develop or follow their own course in China? Is there something that outside actors should do to try and influence developments inside China?

Audrey Tang: I think the international community, especially the journalism community, has played a big part of making sure that the governance mechanism in Hong Kong did not ultimately get swept out of the global people’s consciousness.

Audrey Tang: If people stop paying attention of what’s happening on the ground in Hong Kong, then they risk to be absorbed into this kind of intranet instead of Internet-like governance and losing their freedom to innovate.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan certainly, for example, many of our universities have offered exchange programs for Hong Kong students and offered them a safe space, for example, to host the Oslo Freedom Forum with the key leaders, for them to exchange freely with the international press community and international correspondents.

Audrey Tang: The fact that the Reporter Without Borders is headquartered in Asia in Taipei also helps to spread the idea that the international NGOs can operate freely here. We have Asia’s most free civic space to keep a very close watch on how Hong Kong progresses. I wouldn’t say that we’re just standing here. Rather, we’re offering a safe space.

Peter Harmsen: I’d like to ask a few questions about yourself as a transgender person in politics. My first question is I’ve seen you described as an anarchist. Is that an apt description?

Audrey Tang: A conservative anarchist.

Peter Harmsen: In what way?

Audrey Tang: Conservative means to respect the various cultures, the more than 20 national languages and cultures, indeed, in a trans-cultural way. That is to say to look at various cultures, including the one that we’re brought up with, from other culture’s point of view, to have the liberty to move across different cultures, not limited to the one that we are in, in our childhood, in our families.

Audrey Tang: That is what conservative means to me. It means honoring, respecting, instead of blindly following, to enter into a transcultural viewpoint. Anarchist simply means that, in my work, I don’t give orders and I don’t take orders. Everybody who work with me work by voluntary association. Again, this is a very simple idea.

Audrey Tang: Conservative anarchism together means something like the original Internet’s vision, meaning that people who freely associate with one another without coercion can, nevertheless, respect each other’s traditions and build new traditions that continues and honors the original ones on a transcultural fashion.

Peter Harmsen: Has it been a challenge, as an anarchist, to enter into government work and work with rigid bureaucracies?

Audrey Tang: Not at all because I had three working conditions, which is voluntary association. I already talk about that. Radical transparency, which I sent you the email explaining all the meetings, including internal ones that I chair, will be transcribed and posted on the Internet after 10 days of co-editing.

Audrey Tang: And location independence, meaning that wherever I’m working, I’m working. I can tour around Taiwan and tour around the world and join as board members of international social innovation organizations and so on while being the digital minister.

Audrey Tang: I would say that this puts me in a Lagrange point between the government and the movements to serve as a channel. Instead of working for any particular side, I’m working with all the sides.

Peter Harmsen: Haven’t you come across any officials with many years or decades of government work behind them that are opposed to this kind of…

Audrey Tang: No, because I don’t go around and tell them what to do. Everybody join my office by voluntary association. In Taiwan, we have 32 ministries. I said very early on, three years ago, that each ministry can send one delegate to my office. Some ministries did. Some did not.

Audrey Tang: Currently, I have 22 colleagues or so, meaning not all ministries have sent people. For example, the Ministry of Defense never send anyone, so I know nothing about national defense. Again, they’re not opposing me because, literally, I only work with people who voluntarily work with me.

Peter Harmsen: Did the Ministry of Defense say why they did not send an official?

Audrey Tang: They did not have to explain. I’m saying that I’m happy to work with people who voluntarily join. I ask why when they join. I don’t ask why when they don’t join.

Peter Harmsen: How many people do you have working for you or working with you?

Audrey Tang: There’s nobody working for me, exactly zero, but there’s 22 people working with me.

Peter Harmsen: No officials or analysts? They’re all representatives from other ministries?

Audrey Tang: It’s around half and half. Maybe a dozen people are from ministries and maybe a dozen or so are people who specialize in, as you said, policy explanation, policy communication, communication experts. There are also facilitation experts. There’s also experts in documentation, in documenting and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Those outside experts count, again, maybe one-half of the work. The career public servants are still more people, more career public service than the outside experts.

Peter Harmsen: Is this a first in the world, or have you used a model from other countries when setting up this ministry?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, this is not called a ministry. This is a horizontal minister’s office. For a long time, we already have this position or ministers without fixed portfolio. At the moment, there’s nine such horizontal ministers. Each has one office from the ministries that they’re liaising with. This is not Taiwan’s first.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan has always operated this horizontal minister since the very beginning, and I’m aware, may be broadly comparable to a new term called digital ambassador. That seems to be fashionable in the past few years around the world, meaning that people who serve as delegates, semi-diplomats, to semi-sovereign entities such as, of course, Google and Facebook. That is also part of my work.

Peter Harmsen: I think you just mentioned that you don’t tell people what to do. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I just do things my way and share the innovations that I’ve made. People may or may not decide to adapt and adopt.

Peter Harmsen: I’m asking you because this is not something I say myself, but I talk to Chinese people. Some Chinese people or people with a Chinese cultural background, they want the rigid bureaucracy. They want to be told what to do. If the boss turns their back to them, they’ll immediately stop working, go online, and…

Audrey Tang: I wonder whether you mostly talked to people who follow the thought of Confucius instead of people who follow the thought from Lao Tzu or Buddha. Taoism and Buddhism are also very popular lineages here. The work that I’m outlining is very Taoist in nature.

Peter Harmsen: We can say that your approach is aligned with Lao Tzu and Buddha, and Buddhism.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, certainly. That’s correct. Conservative anarchism is just a Westernized way to put Lao Tzu’s thoughts, which is Taoism.

Peter Harmsen: Would you say that East Asia, so far, speaking very generally, has been following the Confucian principles more than Buddhist and Taoist principles?

Audrey Tang: It goes from time to time. I would say more clearly that the civil society and the social sector have already synthesized those three cultures and three lineages into very balanced lines of thought, especially around Taiwan. If you visit Taiwan, you will feel that these three lines of thought have converged really well.

Audrey Tang: It is quite true if you look into our bureaucracy that they don’t quite quote as much the thoughts for Lao Tzu and Jiangsu. That is true. Maybe the public sector is less influenced by Taoist principles.

Peter Harmsen: Do you think, in the coming years, we’ll see a bigger influence deriving from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Buddhist principles, and also in the way that government is being performed in certain Asian societies?

Audrey Tang: There are Asian societies where Buddhist thoughts are dominant and not Confucianism. For example, when I visited Bangkok, I feel very strongly that there are Buddhist ideas and cultures in their public service as well.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say Taiwan, this is a new development or anything is Confucianism. I would certainly say that the idea of horizontal network, the idea of doing without doing, meaning that setting up the right atmosphere and configuration instead of designing everything up front, participate, be humble in the design.

Audrey Tang: That seems to be where Taiwan is heading from a more industrial age manufacturing-based society and economy, into a more human-centric, more sustainable, engaging way of designing with people instead of for people.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I would say that it is being one of the first places in the world to try this new mode of collaborative governance, but we’re certainly not the only one. For example, we learn a lot from the civic citizen assemblies, from the citizen town halls, from the  online system, from the Swiss model of referenda, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Many of these European thoughts are new to Taiwan as well. We are currently building a jury system and that is, of course, from the UK, and so on. I would say, when I say “transcultural,” I really mean many, many cultures, not just two or three cultures.

Peter Harmsen: Yeah. I’m writing for people who don’t have a very deep understanding of Asian culture. I was just wondering if you could maybe give a very specific example of something that Lao Tzu or Buddha said which can be transformed into practical advice about how to conduct bureaucratic work today.

Audrey Tang: OK. That is a great question, but that is to say, when I’m trying to offer a quote, I really want to make sure that it’s understood in a way that is not mysticism. [laughs] Like, this is not religion. [laughs] That is instead something that more a guiding principle, instead of something that, to be worshiped, if that’s OK with you.

Audrey Tang: Let’s see. Maybe I’ll read you the 11th stanza of the Tao Te Ching, which is a thought from Lao Tzu. I will also send you the link to make sure that this transcribes well. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: “30 spokes meet in the hub. Where the wheel isn’t is where it’s useful. Hollowed out clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is where is it’s useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn’t, there is room for you. The profit in what is is in the use of what isn’t.”

Audrey Tang: This is one of the more abstract clauses from the Tao Te Ching, but to me, this is why I call the office the Public Digital Innovation Space, meaning that it’s literally space where people can try out various new thoughts.

Audrey Tang: Again, this is like a pot, a room, or a hub, where instead of me insisting anything, instead of me pushing my agenda, I make myself available 40 minutes at a time. My office, we tore down the wall. Literally, people can walk in from the street into the Social Innovation Lab.

Audrey Tang: There’s room for everyone’s new idea to be given equal consideration, as long as they perform this in a transparent vision publicly. The closest analogy I can find in the legal tradition in, for example, UK is called sandbox.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, to make a risk-free or risk-controlled way for people to try out new regulations, new ideas and so on. We allow them to basically speak to the entire society, amplified through our social innovation lab, just like connecting to the various perimeters in a wheel through the spokes, but without us making the judgment.

Audrey Tang: Instead, the society converge on a common understanding after a year or so, and collectively decide, for example, whether e-scooters is a good idea and how is it a good idea, whether UberX is a good idea, and how could we make it a good idea, and so on and so forth.

Audrey Tang: I think to me, it captures the idea of social innovation in sandboxes.

Peter Harmsen: Yeah, that’s a very good example. I’m very grateful for that. It definitely illustrates it really well, I think.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Peter Harmsen: Another thing I would like to ask you is I read that you have offered preferential access to government contracts for companies that employ people with Down syndrome. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: To anyone. There’s more than 400 such organizations now who anyone who can provide an account of how their procurement dollars can transform into social returns of investment, or SROI, that is to say, anyone who can account for the social effect of their income sources becomes a…

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say preferential, but I would say I go out and give an award every year for anyone who procures to more than five million anti-dollars of such social innovation organizations’ products and services. That’s true.

Peter Harmsen: Yeah. It’s just because this particular example of people with Down syndrome is particularly interesting. Was there something about a soccer field? They were involved in designing something like that…?

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah. The social innovation lab itself, the visual design, the soccer field and so on, were done by paintings that turned into public art, but they were originally paintings by people with Down syndrome, and they’re very creative and view the world through topological, geometric lens.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that we look at people with neurodiversity not as a kind of strictly speaking vulnerable population only, but rather to view them as valuable contributors who make unique contributions that we cannot ourselves do.

Peter Harmsen: It’s not so much a political statement about inclusiveness as it is about the inherent benefits associated with involving individuals with those unique perspectives and skills, so…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The more neurodiverse the space is, the more perspectives that one can see the world with, and that’s a net win for everyone. It’s not just symbolic. We literally experience that every day.

Peter Harmsen: Can you give us other examples, apart from the one with the soccer field that we’ve just talked about?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. The social innovations. We give out partnership awards. It’s called Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award, or APSIPA, A-P-S-I-P-A, and every year we give out such awards.

Audrey Tang: The Special Jury Prize last year went to the Cigondewah Fashion Village Lab from Indonesia, in the Bandung Creative City Forum, where they turned the industrial waste from the fashion industry into a community building co-operative that turns these into circular economy materials to make the local culture and local art, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Whereas we initially looked at these pipelines as just wastes, they, through social design, redefined that village into makers of art, and turned waste into material in a way of circular economy.

Audrey Tang: As I said, this is not just about turning people in Taiwan’s creativity. This is actually inviting people all around Asia. We have winners from Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and so on. The jury is from different jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: If you go to the Social Innovation Lab that is my office, you will also see the gifted city service car, which is a service car from people with mobility disabilities. Instead of being street vendor on wheelchairs, which is a more vulnerable position, through service design, the city service car provides the likes of electricity charging, WiFi sharing, and fair trade goods such as teas and coffees, I’m sure, as well as a lot of city service and an interactive screen to make public conversation possible.

Audrey Tang: So that people see these service car operators not as vulnerable people in wheelchairs, but rather providing unique service to the city that people cannot otherwise access, and even act as WiFi stations that share connectivity.

Audrey Tang: Through social design, the important thing is not one or two examples, but rather the systemic to look at which previously vulnerable populations are invited into unique contributors.

Audrey Tang: There is also a case where people with disabilities who are more confined to their bed or their home nevertheless participate in the business information of building information modeling and the Beam or AI lab labeling and so on, and providing the best-of-class service to the business of the building modelers without even knowing that the people who performed the work are constrained in their mobility and so on.

Audrey Tang: Because they redesign the workflow, they actually focus more on such issues. I can go on and on. We have literally 400 cases.

Peter Harmsen: Do you think people not just in Taiwan but everywhere, are missing out by sometimes excluding people like that instead of including them all?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I think there are already certain neurodiversities that are more universally recognized. For example, people on the autistic spectrum are now quite recognized as being exceptional in not only quality assurance and auditing, but also in every place in the workplace that requires honesty and not afraid of directly confronting uncomfortable audited results and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I would say that for certain neurodiversities, this is certainly gaining a lot of ground, and for other neurodiversities, of course, there remains a lot to do. Like Down syndrome, I think around the world, there’s a lot to do.

Peter Harmsen: I was wondering whether you as a transgender person have encountered any problems or any challenges being in the position you are in now where you have a significant amount of political power?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. It really gives me a unique perspective, because I have gone through the two different puberties. I can relate with people with their firsthand experience more, and also, I don’t have this mental mindset in my mind that somehow half of population is different from me. I don’t have that binary thinking, which is again very helpful politically.

Peter Harmsen: Can you give an example how you feel that both sexes are…that you don’t feel any distance with either sex.

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about the genders. It is also about political parties. People know when I enter the cabinet that on the HR form, the field of gender and the field of party affiliation, I entered none on both of the fields. I’m claiming that I’m not partisan and also not associated with a particular gender.

Audrey Tang: This non-binary in both gender and in party affiliation really prompted a lot more discussion around not just the usual LGBTIQ+ rights, which is important, but also how Taiwan may work toward instead of just this bipartisan political landscape, can we move toward a more multidimensional political landscape. I think that is very helpful in this conversation.

Audrey Tang: Usually, people ask me, they are being torn between the blue, and the red, and the green. That’s the three colors in Taiwan politics. It’s like there’s no other colors. I just look at my business card. There’s 17 colors that’s the sustainable goals. The 3 colors are just 3 in the 17.

Peter Harmsen: Would you say the current politics where you have clearly delineated camps belongs to yesterday and we’re moving towards a future where there will be more dimensions in politics?

Audrey Tang: I would say that previously, the representative democracy is useful within the previous constraint, which is it’s difficult for more than, say, anyone who tracks more than 150 people in their head.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost impossible to cooperate simultaneously with a team larger than 150 people. It’s called Dunbar’s number. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, we can synthesize such voices and give what we call the weak link.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, instead of knowing one person for a very long time before working on something, people who we have never met or indeed have never understood in a personal level, nevertheless when we understand that each are following the same protocol, which is more likely nowadays the same hashtag, we can form a relationship of a swift trust, quickly trusting each other to do some work together.

Audrey Tang: Just as we are doing the interview in a very quick turnaround, it’s called swift trust. I think people who care about similar issues can form much mobile adhocracies without any previous coordination.

Audrey Tang: This way of flash-mob-like adhocracy, more and more defines collective action through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, and renders less and less relevant representative democracy the issues that are either very local, so people can just go and take action without waiting for their representative, or very global, that is to say the only way that it will work is if people form such networks in the multilateral way and not actually have a good grasp on that.

Peter Harmsen: What we’ll see in the future is maybe an Internet-based democracy with perhaps several referenda a day?

Audrey Tang: It will be several deliberations concurrently. I don’t know whether it will be referenda or not, but Taiwan has this idea of referenda that’s binding for only two years, which is, again, an interesting contribution to this theory like let’s take a referenda but it’s only good for two years, and after two years, let’s try out something else.

Peter Harmsen: Turning to your transgender personality, you have not encountered any kind of prejudice from politicians or members of the bureaucracy over the last few years?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. I think it speaks a lot about Taiwan’s 12 years of gender mainstreaming work, where every ministry, every public servant is required to go gender impact assessment on all the bills and all the budget that they do.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, people are thoroughly aware of gender mainstreaming, and all the issues that pertains to transgender are already quite understood by the career public service HR department. I don’t find any resistance there.

Peter Harmsen: How about previously in your life, when you were younger? Did you meet more prejudice at that time?

Audrey Tang: I think there are always people who are new to this concept, and there is always room for conversation. Because my hobby is troll hacking, namely to hack the trolls, I enjoy such conversations and such exchange where I can respond to the points where they offer genuine experiences and ignore the parts that are personal attacks and such. I enjoy such exchanges with the wider public about not just gender issues, pretty much about everything.

Peter Harmsen: Would you say over the past 10 or 20 years that Taiwan has become more liberal in this respect? I’m not just talking about government bureaucracy but overall, the overall attitude towards diversity.

Audrey Tang: That’s certainly the case. I would also add to that, Taiwan has become much more liberal in pretty much all intersectional ways, not just around gender, but around cultural differences, ethnic diversity, indigenous people, and new immigrants, and all the different ways of life. Transgender is just one part of it.

Peter Harmsen: It’s hard to imagine a transgender person in a senior political position in China. Do you think your career is an example of how Taiwan and China are moving further apart?

Audrey Tang: It is true that when Dr. Tsai was first elected, people commented not just that she is a woman, but rather she gets elected by her own merit. In many places in Asia, a senior woman’s leadership is somehow kind of associated with either a political family or a political ideology where she is just one part of, and so on, but Dr. Tsai did so entirely on her own merit. I would say that this sets Taiwan apart from most of Asia, not just from the PRC.

Peter Harmsen: Thank you very much for your time. It’s been very interesting.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Excellent questions.

Peter Harmsen: Thanks very much. I will send you the article when it’s published. Probably it will be next Friday or possibly the Friday after.

Audrey Tang: OK, no problem. I’ll send you the transcript when it’s ready. Cheers.

Peter Harmsen: OK. Thanks very much.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Peter Harmsen: Bye-bye.