Because there has been what some people have called the silicon shield. This idea that Taiwan is so vital to the modern global economy because of its computer chips, that democracies would be compelled to come to Taiwan's aid, if China did invade.
Is that silicon shield still intact, is it still your kind of trump card, if you like, should Beijing decide to try to take the island by force?
That brings us back to where we started this conversation.
When you visit capitals, like London and elsewhere, are you reassured by the words that you hear? From other ministers, from senior civil servants, about should you need the West, should there be some kind of conflict?
Thank you very much indeed for your time.
I received this morning an invitation to the atypical course and prestigious CV. She learns to program at 8 years old, leaves school at 14, goes to the United States and founded her startup at 16.
In 2014, she returns to her country of origin, Taiwan, where she actively participates as a civic hacker in the ground-breaking movements against the Kuomintang administration, before joining the new government of the young Asian democracy at 35 years old.
Hello Audrey Tang. Good morning.
You are the Minister for Digital Affairs in Taiwan since 2016, and you advocate for full transparency and open data in your country.
Audrey Tang, you record all the interviews that you give. Are you recording this?
Now, this is very interesting about your view of politics. What does this say on your view of politics?
For you, transparency of information is essential, but can you both be a government minister and still have this view of things?
I am describing you to our listeners, you are a child prodigy of digital technology, you started coding at age 8.
Where did this passion come from?
You left school at age 14 and then you started up your own company at age 16. What did your parents have to say about this? How did it go?
You became a hacker. What is a hacker? I mean, we think of hackers as people, as pirates stealing your confidential data. That's not what you did. You didn't do anything illegal.
What I'm interested in here is how did you go from being a geek, as it were, to become an activist for democracy.
I mean, what's the connection between technology and political activism?
In other countries, the internet was used for repression purposes. Look at China, for instance...
Beyond the cases where the state controls the citizens, there is a big debate about the real problems with social media, the fact that kids are being harassed through the social media. What do you think about that?
You believe you should fight the power of the GAFA?
I said that you were an activist for open source, now you are a minister for digital affairs in Taiwan, and I say the word, to be "conservative anarchist", what does that mean?
But how can you reconcile this conservative anarchism with big companies doing this in the digital industry? Because our listeners should remember that Taiwan is a central hub for the digital industry. And without Taiwan there would be no computer chips, for instance.
Is this to say that you took advantage of that technology during the COVID crisis? The whole world admired your methods
What did you do during the COVID crisis? I mean, you were the digital minister, but what did you do during COVID.
And yet again, there was a major breakthrough by Taiwan. Taiwan was ahead of the rest of the world in the COVID crisis.
How do you explain this? Is this to say that in schools, also in educational terms, do schools learn more about digital technology? Are there government incentives to learn more about information technology?
Taiwan is also a society of hacking citizens, which is called vTaiwan. Can you tell us about that platform?
But there's another use of technology, and that's the way in which Taiwan has to defend itself against cyber attacks. What do you do about that as a minister?
There is another threat, and that is that from artificial intelligence. I mean, for our jobs, do you see that artificial intelligence is a threat or what?
And should one regulate ChatGPT? Is artificial intelligence, when you leave artificial intelligence to itself, might it not run the risk for society?
The free world is afraid for your country, for Taiwan. They are afraid that Taiwan might be attacked by the People's Republic of China.
How are you doing these weeks? Is there a lot of tension? How is this experience right now?
Are there contributions from France?
I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart, Audrey Tang, for having accepted to answer our questions.
Once again, I'll tell the viewers that you are in charge of digital affairs in Taiwan.
Have a lovely day. Thank you.
You work intensively with Ukraine on digital resilience and education. Can you please tell us more about this cooperation?
Unfortunately, I was just here for three months. Too short.
And could you do that permanently or would that be something like that is quite temporary?
And would that be possible to connect the whole Taiwanese system to this system?
There is one... I've just been to INDSR, and you spoke as well about the satellite, about Starlink 2.0, and the question how to actually prevent that the underground cables will be cut, even if it's highly improbable that all of them will be cut because they're international also.
But what are your plans so far? Like they also told me that they might even... because right now I think Taiwan is using some channels on a Singaporean satellite. So if the Chinese attack it, they will actually attack a Singaporean one and a Taiwanese one?
And you're also developing LEO, right? Low Earth Orbiting.
And these are all steps you actually took as a lesson from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Oh yes. That could still happen. What else did you learn from Ukraine?
How does that work on a practical level? For example, I access WeChat, for example, I see there's fake information, what do I do? I'm a journalist, do I have a special forum or post?
How is it... because we also talked to Puma Shen, and he said he's not really troubled about fake news, because that's easy, but he's really troubled about conspiracy theories, because there's not really something you can do about it.
Often they are so wild that you can't, I mean, it doesn't really, even if you say this is not true, people will think you say it's not true because you're part of the circle, blah, blah, blah. So how can you actually counter these?
We had them all.
