Taiwan's Digital Democracy

The island nation of Taiwan produces some of the world’s most advanced technology, commands a robust industrial system, and is governed by efficient state institutions. Moreover, it has succeeded in leveraging information technology and citizen participation into a uniquely successful system of “digital democracy,” most recently credited with containing COVID-19 in Taiwan. This is thanks to a legacy of innovation in response to geopolitical imperatives, namely the threat posed by mainland China. While past success does not guarantee future results, and key challenges loom, Taiwan remains one of the most functional polities in the world.

In 2020, Taiwan attracted international praise for its extremely effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic: the country suffered only seven COVID deaths in total that year and quickly restored normalcy to daily life, while much of the rest of the world was still in lockdown. Taiwan’s success drew plaudits for its unprecedented governance techniques that blended technology with democratic decentralization, with some commentators citing the nation as a model for the West to emulate.[1][2] But Taiwan’s success in this regard was not a fluke. Rather, these capacities come from the Taiwanese government’s long-standing open-mindedness to reinventing its governmental institutions and overall strategic posture based on the capabilities made possible by the latest advances in technology. Globally, there is a widespread perception that Taiwan punches above its weight, whether it’s in the realms of technology, industry, or innovations in governance. This perception is largely true for one simple reason: it has to. Located off of the southeastern coast of mainland China, the democratic and de facto independent country is a key Western ally and a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party, which has continued to officially claim Taiwan as a renegade province of mainland China, ever since Taiwan as we know it was founded by the losing side of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. With a population and economy just a fraction the size of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan’s government has always known that its continued independent existence would depend on superior strategy, with economic development, technological innovation, and institutional flexibility forming the core of such a strategy. Throughout the 20th century, the Taiwanese government undertook conscious efforts to build an indigenous industrial base, and then an indigenous “Silicon Valley” on top of it, in an effort to imitate the best parts of the West. These efforts, ironically, have now surpassed the West itself and have also resulted in a high-trust, highly technically literate government and society that are capable of applying the same open-minded and strategic thinking necessary for foreign policy to domestic issues as well.

Taiwan was one of the first countries in the world to detect and respond to the burgeoning pandemic, in part thanks to a senior government health official reading a highly-upvoted post on Taiwan’s largest online message board about a new disease spreading from China.[3] This might be a funny anecdote in other contexts, but in Taiwan, this detail is emblematic of the reasons Taiwan’s pandemic response was so abnormally effective compared to most other countries. It was not only the government’s response that deserves credit for the country’s success on COVID, but rather the productive interactions between centralized state institutions and civil society at large, where the state develops centralized systems for decentralized, public use, and conversely pays attention to and confers legitimacy on useful initiatives and information provided by ordinary people without government titles.[4] In addition to news and information about COVID-19 rapidly spreading through the Taiwanese internet being monitored by both ordinary citizens and government officials alike, “civic hackers” quickly built tools in collaboration with the government to help people avoid infection and prepare for the pandemic, such as live infection maps and bots to combat misinformation about the virus.[5] Both existing centralized efforts, such as integration of national health insurance data with customs and immigration institutions, online reporting of personal data, and the establishment of a national Command Center for disease control, as well as quickly developed new ones, such as cell phone tracking, ramping up mask production, and quarantine procedures, all proved to be decisive—but only with the voluntary, informed, and enthusiastic participation of a digitally active public that both trusted government measures and had also previously lived through a pandemic when SARS struck the nation more than a decade earlier, and remembered crucial lessons such as the importance of face masks.[6] All of these factors combined to power Taiwan’s success. In the West, including the United States, even though some similar actions were undertaken such as building online monitoring tools, there was no baseline of social trust and institutional capacity to put such tools to use.

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