Steve George: From creators to now, we go to a world leader who has shaken our stage on the global platform quite a few times. I want to introduce and invite the digital minister of Taiwan, Minister Audrey Tang, and joining her on stage today is Emily Chan, a correspondent at CNBC.

Steve George: I know this is going to be a very riveting conversation. I will not take anything away from you guys. I leave the stage to you.

Emily Chan: Thanks very much, Steve and Minister Audrey Tang. Very good to see you and welcome to everybody at Reshape for joining us this morning time here in Hong Kong.

Emily Chan: Very Good to see you, Minister. If you may remember the last time we spoke was in January of last year, I was in Taipei in your office, we were preparing to watch the presidential elections.

Emily Chan: Since then about 20 months has passed and a lot has really happened in the world. The world experienced rapid digitization as a result of the COVID pandemic.

Emily Chan: According to a McKinsey survey, the health crisis brought on years of technological advancement and change in just a matter of months.

Emily Chan: The digitization of customer and supply chain interactions, and internal operations have been sped up by three to four years. What’s more is that these changes are expected to be long lasting.

Emily Chan: Joining us now to discuss this further we have on the line with us from Taipei, Taiwan’s digital minister, Minister Audrey Tang. Thank you for joining us today, and it’s good to see you again.

Audrey Tang: It’s good to see you again and good local time, everyone.

Emily Chan: Hi, Minister, different places around the world experience spikes in COVID cases at different times.

Emily Chan: For Taiwan, COVID was largely kept in check but from May to July, the island saw spiking cases has Taiwan trailed in the digital transformation process because of this, because it didn’t have to rely on it as much and what is being done now to fast track and catch up.

Audrey Tang: We’re down to low single digits of local confirmed cases now. I remember when we last talked, we talked about how to counter disinformation, the info-demic with no takedowns. We’ve been quite successful on that and so far we’ve countered a pandemic with no lockdowns.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, in Taiwan, our digitalization is incremental. For example, to use tele-education.

Audrey Tang: Today, the students still go to school, but we make sure that in the places that require the broadband as a alternative to going to school, because individual schools may be quarantined and so on…from the individual confirmed local cases, they can switch seamlessly into online education and health delivery and so on.

Audrey Tang: When we last spoke, I think, less than one-tenth of Taiwanese people use the national health care via a mobile app. Now, up to one-third of Taiwanese citizens can use the national health insurance as a virtual health card, so that we can scan the health service over at the cameras like this. Indeed, it has been amplified a lot, but not forced.

Emily Chan: In this time, just in recently in fact, Taiwan launched the Digital Transformation Innovation Hub in Kaohsiung. Its focus is on the manufacturing sector which has long been a powerhouse in Taiwan. How are you encouraging digital innovation within other sectors like infrastructure, health care, energy efficiency, and transportation?

Audrey Tang: Yes, indeed in our education system, in both the basic education where people learn about data science and machine learnings. As well as the higher education.

Audrey Tang: Instead of doing exercises, we just pair them with small and medium enterprises in the manufacturing sector, agricultural sector, that want to get their chores basically automated in an assistive fashion. Meaning that, it must be aligned to the privacy and the human values as well as being accountable.

Audrey Tang: The students, instead of being seen as interns, we call them the transformation ambassadors or T大使. These ambassadors bring the perspective of a digital native to a traditional industry. They may get education in Taipei, but actually do their exercise in Kaohsiung as a team.

Audrey Tang: I believe, this pairs the best of both worlds. The wisdom of the people who have spent decades in their verticals, but also the new imagination and design thinking, computational thinking from the younger people who are digital natives and ambassadors.

Emily Chan: Now, as we continue to talk about this innovation hub. It went operational in July. Is this catered more for domestic talent or are you also looking overseas? How do you intend to attract international talent?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is quite unique in that many people, including my Silicon Valley friends, actually chose to stay in Taiwan while working for their original team. Not necessarily a talent domestic company using our Employment Gold Card.

Audrey Tang: The Gold Card community is really growing. I believe there’s more than 3,000 Gold Card holders. You can get this residence certificate even while filing this oversea request. Then after getting this all-in-one card, you can just go and stay in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Again, before the pandemic, I believe it’s in the low hundreds. During the pandemic, because Taiwan is quite safe, we’re now seeing more than 3,000 foreign talent contributing to Taiwan’s start-up as well as many other science and technological fields, while holding this Gold Card so they’re not restricted by employment.

Emily Chan: If we can also talk about the sensitive issue that is stagnant wages that that is also an issue in Taiwan. How important is it to make sure that industries pay their employees at a globally competitive level in order to retain talent and even boost technical expertise?

Audrey Tang: A part of it is the exchange rate between NT dollars and other international currencies, and the market, of course, is working on that.

Audrey Tang: Looking at the longer term, we do see that the young people, when they’re getting their education in the undergrad level, nowadays prefer the talents that are what we call slashes here. They may learn some engineering but they also learn about human-centered design, interaction design, experience design, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Because of the pandemic, first they get to work with international teams. They’re like the Gold Card holders, while they’re living physically in Taiwan, they are actually working on international teams and jobs.

Audrey Tang: Also, that creates a pressure for the local transformation of local small and medium businesses, because they have to then pay more to retain the same kind of talent, who may actually become not time travelers, timezone travelers to work overseas.

Emily Chan: When we talk about digitization, how much of it should be driven by the government and what kind of role should the private sector be playing?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, a lot of digitalization is created prototyped by what I call the social sector, that includes the social entrepreneurs, the local co-ops, non-profits, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Including the g0v, or gov-zero community, which systematically look at the digital services that the government is not doing very well, and fill in the blank. Basically creating open-source forks of the government, this includes, of course, the mask rationing system last year as well as the SMS-based checking contact tracing system this year and so on.

Audrey Tang: While individual members in g0v community may work in a private sector, but they work in a social sector as a civic public infrastructure on the digital realm by contributing into open source. That’s to say there’s no license and restrictions, and because of that it’s a swarm-like innovation system that informs the government what to do. All we did is reverse procurement.

Audrey Tang: The social sector figure out what to do and we make sure there’s a stable and reliable separate security harden supply of the real-time data that enable this kind of public infrastructure. I see this as what I call People-Public-Private partnership, where the social sector gets the idea, the public sector amplifies the idea, finally private sector implements the idea.

Emily Chan: When we talk about the use of technology in a city, I’ll give an example. Here in Hong Kong when the government launched the electronic consumption vouchers, we discovered that it was the elderly that had more difficult time registering and actually using it because it was via either your mobile phone. It was an electronic method in order to use the money that the government was passing out to boost consumption.

Emily Chan: Share with us how you’re educating residents, reaching out to both youths and even seniors in terms of your e-literacy programs. What methods are you using for youths which should be different than for the elderly population?

Audrey Tang: We’re also issuing our stimulus vouchers. Senior people, they can just pick up a phone and call the toll-free number to the local post office to arrange a pick up time or after early November they can just walk into a nearby post office to collect those paper vouchers so they do not need to learn anything new.

Audrey Tang: If they do want to learn something new, a step above that they can hand their national health care card to one of their trusted family members, who will then use the electronic version, the digital version of the stimulus voucher, adding the quota of the elderly into their mobile payment account.

Audrey Tang: Here the design philosophy is that the technology should adapt to the social need. We’re not asking the society to adapt to the technologies. We create the choices, as well as making sure that they are swift and safe, in a sense that we engage the senior people in designing these new services so they do not feel left out, but rather feel that they have co-designed the system.

Emily Chan: Now, as we, of course, are now spending more time on a computer, on technology, we’re also being inundated by information and news on the computer as well. Now, as we’re always in the inter webs, what are you guys doing in terms of filtering out misinformation? How do people…are able to stay ahead of this?

Audrey Tang: We did talk about that, leading to the presidential election. I believe one of the most competent education curriculum in both lifelong and basic education is just to involve the students in the course of making news.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, participatory journalism, when we have middle schoolers’ fact checking their three presidential candidates in their real time debates and forums and so on that creates a very powerful experience that serve a vaccine of the mind, right?

Audrey Tang: If you have worked in a newsroom, if you have understood importance of fact checking and so on, then people become immune. Professional journalists become more or less immune to the misinformation because we have a set of ways to check the sources for finding about the facts.

Audrey Tang: When we involve the young people in decision-making, in deliberation, both online and face-to-face this creates a very similar effort because when they have co-created a policy, even before they are of the voting age, they have to understand then all the stakeholders positions and take all the sides and get a common value out of it, and therefore they will not get, a mindless share, through their hands.

Audrey Tang: If they see some message that is bordering on vengefulness, discrimination, outrage or things like that, simply because they have thought about this and thought it through. Digital competence, not just literacy, education in basic and lifelong education, I believe that’s the most important, and we do have to open up our decision-making process on all levels to even very young people.

Emily Chan: I think Taiwan has been a big beneficiary of COVID in the sense that it is a tech powerhouse, is the crown jewel, TSMC. The world’s largest contract ship maker, a big beneficiary of the global demand for electronics, used in both study and for work from home. Has the pace of this change been too swift for supply to keep up with demand? Is this current pace of digitization sustainable?

Audrey Tang: First of all, I think the digitalization is not just about going paperless, not just going about digitization. Digitalization includes, for example, the user experience and service design that take care of the senior people and so on, and people who are not that versed with the current generation of touchscreens, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I do believe that we are just at the beginning of the digital transformation. At the moment, as you mentioned, this massive transformation of how service delivered maybe takes care only about 80 percent at most of the population.

Audrey Tang: We do need a continued investment to make sure that we do not accidentally leave people behind simply because they speak a different language or prefer a different interaction modality, and that requires sustained investment. I don’t think that we will see the end of that in a couple years.

Emily Chan: How about the way that technology has impacted health care, the importance of the health care innovation as well as the digitization in this industry?

Audrey Tang: I mentioned in Taiwan, because we’re quite…our traffic through high speed rails, for example, from the north mode to south mode is just slightly over one hour and a half. We did not have that strong motivation to develop telemedicine, teladoc notice and things like that, but of course of COVID and quarantining of people who may be in close contact with people who are confirmed cases change everything.

Audrey Tang: We had to redesign our entire…for example, cybersecurity perimeters, to the national health insurance service, to have cybersecurity at the edges, to develop new what we call zero trust networks, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that even when people are quarantined, they can get the full set of digital services online and that takes care not just people in quarantine or rural areas or indigenous nations, which are the first pilot cases but starting this year, we’re opening up this for the general practice, and they are now also eligible for reimbursement from our national health care.

Audrey Tang: I do think that this is an excellent opportunity for the entire health care sector, not just on the medicine level, but also on preventative health and community health level to be digitalized.

Emily Chan: Climate change, sustainability, and ESG are all topical and important. What are you doing to encourage digital technologies to be developed and used in an environmentally friendly way?

Audrey Tang: We’re having annual presidential hackathons, that we engage the global community. Just yesterday, we reviewed the top teams from the US, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Nicaragua, Colombia, Sweden, Brazil, and Czech Republic, who are contributing to what we call the climate action in our international presidential hackathon track.

Audrey Tang: Last year, our domestic track already developed a lot of very innovative solutions.

Audrey Tang: For example, for people to get push notifications when heat damage is about to hit their area to remind them to drink more, but then paired them with the local…what we call tea serving, drinking fountains provided by local businesses that has ESG credentials that people can learn more while refilling their bottles without buying new plastic and so on.

Audrey Tang: Just this very proposition alone probably takes off like 9 or10 of the 17 SDG goals, and we encourage this cross-sectoral collaboration. When they gets the trophy from our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, when five teams each year, we promised within the next year we’ll make it into a nationwide policy just as a presidential promise.

Emily Chan: Minister, finally, we can’t talk about digitization without talking about digital currency. True or false, a digital economy needs to include digital currency.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, and I do think that distributed ledger technology and a community behind it serves as a very powerful research lab for new governance method. The presidential hackathon. I just mentioned, used quadratic voting, and that’s first invented and tested out in the Ethereum community along with quadratic funding.

Audrey Tang: We’re now using it for the presidential cultural awards as well, and we’re now systematically looking at all the new innovations. For example, last year when you dedicate your uncollected mask rationing and quota to international humanitarian aid, you get an NFT with your name on it, for example.

Audrey Tang: We’re learning all these new governance concepts from this research community and applying it to nationwide governance.

Emily Chan: Now, El Salvador last week became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. I would love to hear your take on this whether governments would ever consider using cryptocurrency as legal tender in Taiwan,

Audrey Tang: Well, given timeless, strong pro environment, polity and the popular will probably the whatever distributed ledger technology that we end up using need to prove that it does not harm the environment.

Emily Chan: Minister Audrey Tang, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us and share about the digitization of Taiwan. And on that note, I hand things back to our moderator.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Steve George: Thank you so much. Can I have one question for you? You just said, “Live long and prosper.” I have to ask you. Are you a huge Trekkie?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Definitely. The response should be, “Peace and long life.”

Steve George: “Star Wars” or “Star Trek,” which one do you go for?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

Steve George: Star Wars or Star Trek, which one do you go for?

Audrey Tang: Both. Definitely both. It’s like a quantum superposition.

Steve George: My kids would love you for that because we are all huge Trekkies and Star Wars fans. You have also went with a very famous line from Star Trek.

Steve George: You mentioned about digital learning, thank you so much, Emily, for bringing those concepts out there. From a lot of what you mentioned it’s about educating, whether it’s the masses on ESG or whether you’re talking about digital learning to support fake news, do you see more countries doing this or you are investing in the education space, especially the digital space?

Steve George: Do you see us, Taiwaners, as trying to be a template of what other countries should be doing? What do you think are the areas there, as well?

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan model of the People-Public-Private partnership has indeed gotten a lot of interest around the world who are looking to reshape their education system, not to be standard-answer based, but rather competence…that is to say maker based.

Audrey Tang: Whereas, literacy is just reading and watching the news, competence is being able to remix and make the news in a journalistically rigorous fashion. I believe many jurisdictions look at what we are doing and discover really that, this is a long term solution to the disinformation crisis.

Audrey Tang: Whereas the individual, of course, like working on the lists of like the SDG where the EU tasked the large social media companies to essentially rule out hate speech and dial down its influences and so on may work in a short term.

Audrey Tang: The people who spread hate speech and so on, just adjust their way of posting hate speech. But if we make sure there is lifelong education in how news room works and people see themselves as basically contributing to journalism then that is longer lasting vaccine. I would put it this way.

Steve George: You know I definitely want to bring out a lot of… I could interview you for a much longer time. Emily has got just the same ideas, but because we are in a very packed agenda, this time I want to thank you for your time and also you for joining us today. I appreciate, for the impact and sharing with us some of the practices that Taiwan has put in place.

Steve George: We as world leaders around the world should be practicing as well. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Again, live long and prosper.

Steve George: Live long and prosper. Right guys, now from Star Trek from world leaders to the conversation. I definitely want everyone here to listen into. We are moving to someone that I think, we are happy to leave our future generation in these hands. As a father of two very sweet children…