Across the world, democracy is on a
decline. Authoritarianism is on the rise.
Global freedom has eroded for the 18th
consecutive year.
Audrey Tang, mm-hmm. What is your
greatest hope for democracy across the globe?
That people see democracy as a
social technology, something that people
can construct together, that they can
improve in the here and now.
We can code up political
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systems. The Sunflower Movement was a
real turning point for Taiwan's
democracy. When the Sunflower Movement
happened, I typed to my colleague, I have
to leave now. Democracy needs me. I
brought a very long cable for internet
connection. I live streamed through
Twitter. Everybody saw it is possible for
democracy to evolve, to come up with
novel policies simply by asking the
people, what should we do?
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Together. I was born with a heart defect.
And one day I just fainted. I woke up in
a hospital and they told me the hole in
my heart has grown. I could die. This
awareness that everything can be reset
tomorrow reminds me of Taiwanese
democracy. We can lose our democracy
just with a couple of
missiles. I think there's a lot that the
world can learn from
Taiwan. The US is running on a 250-year-old
operating system. There is a strong
desire to move beyond this and
properly rethink from first principles
what would democracy in the 21st century
actually look like. We can make the
government more open to the public. It'll
be easier for people to access the data,
to analyze it.
Transparency. Audrey has created the
opportunity to make Taiwan the most
exciting constitutional democracy in the
world. I think it's a very critical
moment. China really wants to invade
Taiwan. You're sitting on a place that is
the flash point if there's going to be
World War III. And yet there's calm in the
eye of the hurricane. And that calm, I
think, emanates from all that Audrey's
done. We can become co-creators of our
democratic system, reconfiguring society
in a way that is more transparent, more
inclusive, more fair.