Adrienne Wu: Hello.

Audrey Tang: Greetings. This is Audrey.

Adrienne Wu: Greetings. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am Adrienne Wu, Research Assistant from GTI. We communicated before through email.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Hello there, Mr. Tang. My name is Zoe. I’m going to be assisting with the interview today.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. We’re not going to do video, right? This is audio only?

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Yeah, it’s audio.

Adrienne Wu: Can you hear us OK?

Audrey Tang: Yep.

Adrienne Wu: Excellent. Your audio level sounds good as well.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Adrienne Wu: Since we value your time and we don’t have a lot of time today, we’ll jump straight into the questions, if that’s OK?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Adrienne Wu: I’m going to start recording right now.

Adrienne Wu: I’d like to begin somewhat broadly to set the stage for Taiwan’s current efforts with soft power. Soft power comes from three sources – culture, political values, and from policy. In your opinion, what are the key features of Taiwan’s soft power?

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s collaboration across diversity. I often say that we’re caught between the Eurasian Plate on one side and the Philippine Sea Plate on the other. When they bump into each other, we’ve got earthquakes.

Audrey Tang: Those earthquakes also made the tip of Taiwan – that’s the Jade Mountain, Saviah, Batongguan, or Yushan – to grow a couple of centimeters every year toward the sky. That’s the symbol of collaboration across diversity.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Excellent. Going along with that, there are many who believe that democracy and human rights in Taiwan are central to its soft power and that democracy should be used to promote Taiwan abroad and build bridges between Taiwan and the international community. Do you agree with this approach?

Audrey Tang: I would say, we approach democracy in a very different era compared to many more traditional republican or democratic tradition jurisdictions. Indeed, I was born under martial law. It was not until when I turned 15 in 1996 that we got our first direct election of the president. By that time, the world web is already here.

Audrey Tang: For Taiwan, the Internet, the digital, and democracy is the same generation. Literally, the same year actually for most of the people.

Audrey Tang: From the very beginning, digital democracy has been our distinguishing factors in that we don’t imagine democracy as something that is strictly just voting, which would be very low bandwidth, just a few bits every four years very high latency.

Audrey Tang: Rather empowering people to devise new ways of democratic organizations from the club’s movement to the participatory budgeting, from e-petitioning to the Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: There’s all different ways of doing democracy that are reinforcing and not replacing the vote. The vote is still very important.

Adrienne Wu: What you said is fascinating, especially how in Taiwan democracy and this digital revolution has been growing together. What might be some of the opportunities or challenges of using democracy to promote Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: When we talk about digital democracy, it’s important to understand that digital is about connecting people to people, just as we’re now connected despite being in different places or even different time zones.

Audrey Tang: It makes sense to also respect the traditions, the cultures of the other time zone when it comes to digital. Across digital, you can’t coerce the other side to do democracy the way you do, so that it has a non-colonial nature, to begin with.

Audrey Tang: I often like digital democracy to that of bubble tea. Bubble tea originated from Taiwan, but we do not have this patent recipe. If you use a white appeal cup-like tapioca, if you use soy milk or any sort of milk, or any tea, even rooibos, why not? You could still get to call it bubble tea.

Audrey Tang: The point here I’m making is that it is open innovation. People see the model of Taiwan of countering the pandemic with no lockdown, countering the infodemic without takedowns.

Audrey Tang: Instead of just doing a carbon copy and that would be colonial, they get to choose the ingredients of what’s digital, what’s democracy and get inspired, instead of being directly controlled or coerced by Taiwan.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: I love the bubble tea analogy, that’s great. Going along with that, Taiwan has become a symbol of that abroad as well. Just recently, it’s been included as a partner in the State Department’s initiative on the declaration for the future of the Internet.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Could you elaborate on the purpose of this initiative and how you see Taiwan’s specific role it, and what Taiwan is doing or planning to do to implement its vision and principles?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. When we think about tech nowadays, not a lot of people in many jurisdictions think about democracy, think about promoting a more prosocial collaborative way of doing things.

Audrey Tang: Rather people think about polarization, they think about top-down authoritarian state’s use of Internet technologies to do surveillance state or sovereign capitalism, is sometimes they’re intertwined.

Audrey Tang: The Internet while its original vision is entirely democratic, it’s become more and more a symbol of a top-down panopticon and so on.

Audrey Tang: The declaration of the future for the Internet is to make sure that we go back to the roots of the Internet. That is to say, rough consensus, good enough consensus, and running code interoperability.

Audrey Tang: People in the very beginning of the Internet have been able to choose their way to send emails. There’s all sorts of different ways to send emails, receive emails, and host emails, and there’s no lock-in of any client compared to the instant messages that you probably have tons of those on your phone.

Audrey Tang: The original vision of the Internet is far more democratic. To me, the declaration is so that we commit significant resources toward making the future of the Internet true to our values, instead of forcing the societal value to adapt to that of a smart city. We want instead, smart citizens.

Adrienne Wu: It’s such a great view I think to go back to giving the Internet to everybody, and not just coding it in certain areas and tying that into a more democratic view of the future.

Adrienne Wu: Can you also elaborate on how digital tools and AI, including your presence on social media, which I’ve had a lot of friends say that they’re amazed at how responsive you are on Twitter, and they’ve been impressed by that? Some of my American friends as well just have phrased that.

Adrienne Wu: Could you talk about how this is related to diplomacy? How can these tools fit into a larger soft power strategy for Taiwan, and what impacts might it have?

Audrey Tang: Our running hashtag on Taiwan as you know is #TaiwanCanHelp. Meaning that we’re willing to help and able to help pretty much any of the Sustainable Development Goals, all 17 of them.

Audrey Tang: In realizing this vision, I check Twitter is a Pomodoro method, every half an hour. I stay very focused, no disturb mode for 25 minutes, and then I’d take five minutes to check Twitter. Whenever I hear something or I see something that I may contribute to, I just respond directly.

Audrey Tang: This responsiveness is key because democracy to me is a technology, too. You can implement democracy through higher bandwidth.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, instead of just approval or disapproval or some polls and so on, and then try to read those polls, you can have a real conversation with people who don’t like, for example, a part of public service like tax filing.

Audrey Tang: I understand in many jurisdictions when people do not like their experience of tax filing that there’s very little they can do because the tax filing system has been already I will say semi-monopolized, by either the state or the companies working very closely to the state.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan people on social media when they post, for example, it was explosively hostile for Mac users and Linux users to use and so on, we have a system of participation officers that reaches out and just ask them, “Hey, would you like to attend a workshop a couple of weeks down the line, so that we can collaboratively design the tax filing experience together?”

Audrey Tang: The people who are very angry about their tax filing experience, I don’t know whether anyone can be very happy. Anyway, very angry that they had the experience have a lot of motivation to turn that anger into something that’s co-creative, that’s inclusive co-creation.

Audrey Tang: That’s how we thought a much better tax-filing experience back in 2017-18, by listening very closely, very quickly responding high-bandwidth, low-latency way to social media. You may call it diplomacy. You may call it public participation. To me, it’s all the same thing.

Adrienne Wu: Some of these systems that you were talking about, for example, tax filing, seem like it has more of a domestic focus. Can you talk a little bit about how it might move from a more domestic focus to making more international connections between Taiwan and the international community?

Audrey Tang: The point I’m making is that it’s not like only Taiwan citizens file taxes. It’s not like only Taiwan people see advertisements near the election times that pushes a very curious agenda. That is part of the information manipulation, of course. It’s not like only Taiwanese people encounter scams on Facebook and so on.

Audrey Tang: Whenever we have this kind of collaborative meetings, it’s very important that we also invite the international counterparts, the Facebooks of the world, to the table. When they are at the table, like Uber or Airbnb before them, instead of demanding them to do anything, we show them a prototype, a demonstration of what has already worked thanks to the co-creation.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, our Control Yuan, the Auditing Office for Elections, and so on, publish entirely as open data all the campaign donations and expenses. We discovered that social media advertisement was not filed. Then, the local, more pro-social social media like PTT and so on, all signed on this accord of countering disinformation together.

Audrey Tang: When we invite Facebook to the table, they committed before we passed any law, we haven’t passed any law yet, that just in the Taiwanese jurisdiction, they will publish all the Taiwan-sponsored advertisements or even external-sponsored advertisements to ban foreign interference.

Audrey Tang: Even for domestic ones, to publish transparent data immediately such that you can see whether it’s part of foreign meddling or not. This example was then made known by people in the civic integrated team, the human rights groups, and so on, that Facebook can do that, given sufficient social pressure and the threat of social sanction by the civil society.

Audrey Tang: Gradually, it spread to other jurisdictions since its first introduction in 2019. I would say it is diplomacy, but it is not the traditional track-one diplomacy. I call it track-zero diplomacy.

Audrey Tang: Because the digital realm is shared, whatever experiences we had can become part of the diplomatic conversations with, for example, the European counterparts, the American counterparts, and so on, when they are tackling the same issue. It’s not just to professional diplomats, it’s to everyone who cares about the role of social media vis-à-vis democracy.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: That is a great point. I love that you bring up presenting, as you say, a prototype that we know works. Along with that, is there a Taiwan model for Internet governance?

Zoe Weaver-Lee: In your view, what is the right balance and the legal framework to say that can promote innovation, as well as regulations that can keep the Internet not only free and open but also at the same time, safe and secure?

Audrey Tang: I call it a people-public-private partnership or a norm-first approach. In Taiwan, instead of diving into the law, the code, or the data of things, what’s important is the norm of things. What’s considered normal in times before elections to post social or political advertisements on Facebook?

Audrey Tang: What’s considered normal for people to interface with the tax filing experience? What’s considered normal to counter the pandemic, to enable contact tracing, but without sacrificing privacy?

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan model is to build a norm layer where people across diversity, again, who have very different cultures, very different ideas about how things should work, nevertheless come to an agreement on the fundamental values when it comes to some specific challenges of our time.

Audrey Tang: Once those specific values are identified and codified as a norm. That spreads to all corners of the world. The public sector amplifies those norms. The private sector implements those norms.

Audrey Tang: This, I think, is the benefit of digital democracy that enables everyone to feel we can live with it, instead of the more traditional low-bandwidth democracy, where at any given time, 49 percent of people may feel we have lost the referendum or things like that.

Adrienne Wu: I love that you talk about fundamental values and making these bridges between countries and people. Taiwan is often described by its leaders as being on the front line of democracy in the face of an increasing totalitarian China.

Adrienne Wu: What are the lessons that Taiwan offers the free world for countering authoritarian influence, especially in the digital space?

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the maximalist of so-called smart cities shares a lot of very similar impulses as state surveillance. Both are centralized. Both make the people transparent to their technologists, instead of making the technology transparent to the citizens. There’s a lot of asymmetry going on.

Audrey Tang: Fundamentally, people in the liberal democratic world, especially people who have signed on the Future of the Internet Declaration, all want things to be the reverse. That is to say, democracy should make technology work for democracy, not the other way around.

Audrey Tang: The narrative of the authoritarian impulses previously always says that, “But top-down is more efficient. Authoritarian means we make decisions faster.” Of course, geopolitical developments this year showed us while it may be very efficient, but authoritarian regimes also are very efficient in making mistakes. There’s no checks and balances to correct those mistakes.

Audrey Tang: Where on the other side, democratic resilience, that is to say, people offering their genuine first-hand experiences, collaborating on the free and open Internet results in a much better, more nuanced response whenever there’s an emergent threat. I’m talking not just about the pandemic or infodemic now, but an actual assault, a physical assault.

Audrey Tang: Starting this year, the narrative is that democracy is more resilient. Especially in the digital space, we need to protect the freedom to assemble, the freedom of not just speech, but to organize so that the people, the social and civic sectors can organize their own responses that deliver outcomes in the face of the challenges of our time.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: All those are excellent points, especially the one about making digital technology also work for democracies. I think that has remained pretty central to your philosophy as well.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: We would also love to touch on some of your more personal projects as well. Starting from May of this year, you’ve been collaborating with “TaiwanPlus” to release the podcast series “Innovative Minds with Audrey Tang,” which is excellent.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Considering that TaiwanPlus aims to “give Taiwan an independent voice” on the international stage, can you talk about how your podcast episodes tie in with this goal? What sorts of factors do you consider when you plan your episodes?

Audrey Tang: I like that you skipped over the question about the inability to agree on what Taiwan culture is. What’s the best advocate for the Taiwanese culture?

Adrienne Wu: Sorry. We can go back to it. We took out some questions. We weren’t sure about time.

Audrey Tang: I love that you skipped right over it because that’s my response to your current question about TaiwanPlus. Taiwan is about collaboration across diversity.

Audrey Tang: The inability to pin Taiwan to any particular culture means that the Taiwanese culture is a meta-culture that prides ourself to connecting bubbles and teas, that connects heavy metal to parliamentary inquiries, effective as in Freddy.

Adrienne Wu: We did cover this at GTI actually.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. This collaboration across diversity is the goal that I want to stress. In that, I invite people, not necessarily Taiwanese, but people who embody this kind of connection across diversity, people who are bridges like Vitalik Buterin who said on my show that he wants to be a bridge of everything.

Audrey Tang: I’m like, “You mostly bridged the open source, free software world and the finance world, which is pretty good, but it’s far from a bridge of all, of everything.”

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the point that I’m trying to make is that this bridge across everything is a pretty good vision to what the Taiwanese culture is all about as a direct contrast to the top-down, shutdown, takedown, lockdown culture in some nearby jurisdictions.

Adrienne Wu: Since we skipped that question, I wanted to touch on a little bit, what kind of things do you think that Taiwan could be doing better to take advantage of some of these problems where they can’t decide on things, they can’t make bridges?

Adrienne Wu: In addition to your very excellent podcast episodes, what are some other ways that you think Taiwan could be leveraging that further to make better bridges?

Audrey Tang: I admire the Estonian example of handing out e-residency. The previous president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves was on the TaiwanPlus Show. I think it’s going to air soon, this July. He talked about how they very creatively designated a computer, a server-host in Luxembourg as part of their embassy that enjoys everything that entails.

Audrey Tang: They turned the Westphalian IPS, flipped it around, and say that “We get to stream all our updates to our house of registration system to Luxembourg, but Luxembourg cannot touch it. That is our territory.” They get to ensure integrity and resilience, even when facing geopolitical threats.

Audrey Tang: Later on, they extended that so that if you can touch upon such computers in other jurisdictions that are natural extensions of Estonia, then you get also, be an extension, you get to an e-resident. Then, you enjoy, for example, the right to create companies, to do business, to file taxes in Estonia, even though you’ve never been to Estonia.

Audrey Tang: Previously, what relied on this territorial, this entering of the border, checking your identity at the border, and so on, is now replaced by Estonia to a mutual authentication and trust, a fabric of trust on the Internet to anyone who identifies with the way Estonians do things.

Audrey Tang: Most Estonian user-residents do have their passport in their original jurisdiction. They don’t become Estonian residents or citizens, they become also Estonian. Taiwan could cultivate more like that, to be also Taiwanese.

Audrey Tang: During the pandemic, because of their Taiwan Gold Card, this program, we’ve got quite some people, actually, a lot of my friends in Silicon Valley was in Taiwan during that two years, taking a Gold Card. A Gold Card is eligible to people who’ve never been to Taiwan. You can complete the Gold Card registration process even without setting your foot to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: You can use that to enter Taiwan even during the height of the pandemic. What I’m trying to get at is that now that the pandemic moved to post-pandemic, or at least postponed pandemic, we need to expand this thought of Gold Cards to more people who may not want to become Taiwanese, but they want to identify and be also Taiwanese.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Those are great examples. I love this very comprehensive overview that you’ve given us in the past 20 minutes or so. I would like to move to a close here. Perhaps, you can comment on the future of Taiwan’s soft power and perhaps, describe what some of the challenges that you expect Taiwan to face or even opportunities that they take advantage of in the coming years.

Audrey Tang: I believe that we should expand on the #TaiwanCanHelp and focus on the things that are anti-rival. Meaning, that like knowledge, norms, code, or data, these are the things that if I give you a copy and you use my copy, I don’t feel a loss. I feel a gain because you will probably improve on the knowledge.

Audrey Tang: Like our Q&A, where we’re having this exchange, we’re not sacrificing anything. We’re exchanging our views on things to the mutual benefit of all. We’re publishing this into the Creative Commons so people who are not part of this conversation can nevertheless take snippets of it and remix it. I’ve had my interviews remixed into a hip-hop song in Japan by a band called Dos Monos.

Audrey Tang: The journalist and I were both very surprised, but also happy that we get to reach an entirely very different audience thanks to the hip-hip band. Something like that, a remix, vibrant, more ingredients to the bubble tea that is the Taiwanese dish of democracy, I believe that is our future.

Adrienne Wu: I always love hearing you speak. I learn so much every time I listen to an interview of yours. Are there any developments that we should be aware of in the coming months? Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to discuss in our remaining time?

Audrey Tang: This September, when the parliament starts, we will have a new ministry in Taiwan, the Ministry of Digital Affairs or MODA. Moda, I’m told, means fashionable in Italian and Spanish.

Audrey Tang: It’s going to be a very fashionable ministry. It rhymes with MOFA, our foreign service. One is magical. One is fashionable.

Audrey Tang: MODA will work very well with MOFA and work together to build the democracy networks.

Adrienne Wu: To comment on fashionable, my sister’s a huge fan of yours. She wanted me to tell you that she loves your outfits, your fashion, and stuff.

Zoey: It works perfectly.

Adrienne Wu: A perfect name for you in the future.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I’m humbled, humbled.

Adrienne Wu: Thank you so much for joining us. We don’t have anything else we’d like to touch on.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: You’ve covered quite a bit, Minister Tang. We very, very much appreciate your time.

Adrienne Wu: We’re awed to be able to have this interview. Thank you so much for talking with us. We also have an intern on the call, Koji Kawamoto, who is listening in and making sure that we keep on time and hit all the points.

Adrienne Wu: We will be sure to let you know when the final episode comes out. We’ll be editing it here in the next few months. We’ll be sure to pass it to your team when the final version is ready to go.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: We’ll make sure we remix it properly.

Audrey Tang: Can I publish the transcript on my local recording before you publish or you would like me to embargo it? I’m fine about embargoing, just let me know.

Adrienne Wu: Maybe waiting until we publish would be more preferred. We can keep you in the loop.

Audrey Tang: Sure. It’s good. Just let me know about a date. I’ll schedule the publication in the Creative Commons on that date, of the raw recording.

Adrienne Wu: That sounds perfect. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Adrienne Wu: Thank you. Have a good rest of the day. I hope it’s nice in Taipei right now.

Audrey Tang: It is. Am going to record the next TaiwanPlus episode with Kevin, the co-founder of Twitch, Kevin Lin.

Adrienne Wu: Oh, my goodness.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: I can’t wait.

Adrienne Wu: We look forward to this. We look forward to its publishing.

Audrey Tang: Cheers then. Live long and prosper.

Zoe Weaver-Lee: Thank you.

Adrienne Wu: Live long and prosper.

Audrey Tang: Ciao.