Anti-Pandemic Policies in Estonia and Taiwan: Digital Power, Sovereignty and Biopolitics

Abstract

Taiwan and Estonia are known as digital democracies facing threats from neighbors exploiting the vulnerabilities stemming from their degree of digitalization. Nevertheless, in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan and Estonia have highlighted the strengths of digital democracy in combating a non-traditional security threat without employing the strong-arm tactics of authoritarian states. The goal of the article is to distinguish between vulnerability in cyberspace and digital power and put forward a conception of digital power to explain how Estonia and Taiwan were using their digital prowess to combat COVID-19. We argue that on one hand, their reliance on cybertechnology makes them particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks, but on the other their digital power enhances their global stature and domestic capacity to address threats such as COVID-19. The article starts by engaging with the ongoing academic debate on the concept of digital power and its political core. In the next section we adapt this concept to the policy practices of digital governance in Estonia and Taiwan. Lastly, we look more specifically at how investments in the IT sphere and e-governance were helpful for the two countries during the initial stage of the COVID-19 crisis. In conclusion, we highlight the paradox of two democracies choosing to extend the reach of the state into society through the use of digital tools to combat COVID-19. We further note that the pandemic provides a new biopolitical understanding of vulnerability and power in the digital realm.

1. Introduction

Taiwan and Estonia are known as digital democracies. As both face threats from neighbors, their degree of digitalization typically has been seen as a vulnerability. The cyber attacks from Russia that Estonia faced in 2007 brought home the potential for cyberspace to be used as a domain of war. Similarly, Taiwan has faced repeated cyberthreats from the People’s Republic of China which claims it as a renegade province. Nevertheless, in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan and Estonia have highlighted the strengths of the use of digital tools by democratic states—what we call digital democracy—in combating a non-traditional security threat without employing the strong-arm tactics of authoritarian states. The main aim of this article is to distinguish between vulnerability in cyberspace and digital power and put forward a conception of digital power to explain how Estonia and Taiwan were using their digital prowess to combat COVID-19. Our hypothesis is two-fold: on one hand, their reliance on cybertechnology makes them particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks, but on the other their digital power enhances their global stature and domestic capacity to address threats such as COVID-19.

Therefore, the selection of the two cases was made by the logic of most similar research design. Two interrelated criteria of similarity were of utmost importance. Geopolitically, both Estonia and Taiwan are located in close vicinity to their much larger and powerful neighbors, Russia and China, whose policies represent systemic security risks for their smaller neighbors. This explains the importance of the digital dimension for the two compared countries that are widely known as IT-savvy and investing their resources in the cyber sphere as a compensation for—and protection against—locational insecurities.

The empirical analysis consisted of several stages. First, we have selected a critical mass of primary data and categorized it into three types of sources: (a) information from Estonian and Taiwanese governmental websites about their digital initiatives and cyber-defense, (b) and from non-governmental actors in both countries, including data and interviews by members of the IT and startup communities; and (c) for the analysis of the COVID-19 response we also refer to information provided by medical authorities. For secondary sources we consulted two types of publications: (a) media materials covering the specific policies of the two governments in the digital sphere, and (b) the academic literature, including some survey research.

The time frame for this analysis is the first year of the current coronavirus crisis, from March 2020 when the first measures of lockdown were undertaken all across the globe, to the start of mass-scale vaccination in the beginning of 2021. As we see it, it was this initial phase of the anti-pandemic crisis management that—due to the dramatic shock of the death toll all across the world required the utmost mobilization of all societal resources for creative solutions, including in the domain of digitalization.

The article consists of three parts. We start by engaging with the ongoing academic debate on the concept of digital power and its political core. In the next section we adapt this concept to the policy practices of digital governance Estonia and Taiwan. In our last section we look more specifically at how investments in the IT sphere and e-governance were helpful for the two countries during the COVID-19 crisis in the spring of 2020. In conclusion we highlight the paradox of two democracies choosing to extend the reach of the state into society through the use of digital tools to combat COVID-19. We further note that the pandemic provides a new biopolitical understanding of vulnerability and power in the digital realm.

2. Conceptualizing Digital Power

In the current academic discussion, there is one point we find particularly important—a distinction between technical and political dimensions of cyber and digital policies (Sharp 2018, p. 46). Arguably, “beliefs that cyberspace will be a libertarian utopia for individuals and a technological cornucopia for corporations now look utterly unrealistic… Cyberspace is no longer the apolitical province of non-state actors. Its power and ubiquity made it inherently political” (Jayawardane et al. 2016, p. 66). Yet still very little is known about how administration and management of IT resources “translates into political power” (Cavelty 2018, p. 316) and, more specifically, into digital power, a concept that is open for competing interpretations of its key “philosophical and political meanings” (Slack 2016, p. 71).

From our perspective, digital power is an ambivalent phenomenon. On one hand, digital power is oftentimes discussed with retrospective references to measuring cyber security on the basis of state ranking (Global Cyber Security Index 2018), which is meant to derive the specificity of the digital sphere from previous experiences of territorial sovereignty. There are plenty of academics who agree with state-centric views on the whole gamut of cyber and digital matters, including Joseph Nye’s idea of drawing parallels between regulating the cyber domain and negotiating nuclear deals between major powers in the past, and applying the language of deterrence (Wilner 2017). Often it is traditional international hegemons that feature as major actors in global digital and cyber fields (Choucri et al. 2014): “just as the Montreux Declaration clarified obligations and best practices of states with respect to private military and security companies, we could envision similar outcomes in a warfighting-dominant cyber domain” (Hollis and Ohlin 2018, p. 445). In some interpretations, digital space is compared with the “Western frontier”, “an unexplored land” free “from legal and social constraints associated with the civilized East” (Cavelty 2013). Similarly, digital issues are viewed through the prism of ostensibly geospatial characteristics: “Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the 19th-century West. It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse, hard to get around in, and up for grabs” (Betz and Stevens 2011). By the same token, the digital sphere might be perceived as a realm of struggle between “Western bloc” and “Eastern bloc”, which leads to an ostensibly realist perspective: “it is easier to understand cybersecurity if we adopt Clausewitzian notions and see it as an extension of interstate politics… Since cyberspace is manmade, there is nothing stopping national borders from emerging in it. Furthermore, just as states ensure national safety with militaries, equivalents need to be created for cyberspace…Sovereign states can control cyberspace as they desire … because the physical elements of cyberspace need to be somewhere, providing “host” states with certain powers over them” (Baram and Menashri 2019, p. 93). In this vein, digital politics allegedly reinforces “the advantages of states that already possess significant terrestrial military advantages” (Gartzke 2013, p. 68). Apparently, there is some logical connection between the emphasis on the geopolitical approach, with the inevitable veneration of sovereignty and borders, and a “resurgent authoritarianism in cyberspace” (Deibert 2015, p. 76) that in many respects successfully adapts to the globalized world and by doing so “threatens to stifle liberal democracy” (Deibert 2018, p. 421).

Yet we do not find this logic convincing, and treat digital power as a new type of power that relativizes the advantages and disadvantages of the sovereign size and territorial location, and redefines strength and weakness as political concepts. The nation-states’ sovereign digital power may often challenge such traditional geopolitical hierarchies as core versus periphery, and major powers versus small nations. There are many voices who deem that the geopolitical basis of any power ought to decline in importance in an increasingly digital world. Indeed, in most cases sources of threats in the 21st century cannot be identified on the map, since it is not necessarily states that stand behind perpetrators, and it is not exclusively governments that should be ‘first responders’. Low-cost technologies also diminish the salience of state resources for digital actorness. This viewpoint deploys the concept of digital power into the incipient realm of post-national and post-sovereign, yet still anarchic, world politics, where lines of distinction between the inside and the outside are blurred, yet demands for control and surveillance are on the rise.

Thus, the progression of IT and cyber technologies makes us distinguish between territorial sovereignty and digital sovereignty as two distinct yet interconnected forms of power relations. Our thinking is in line with a presumption of “new territorialities emerging in cyberspace” (Lambach 2020, p. 2) that translate familiar geopolitical logic into assemblages that “move away from the traditional centre of the nation-state to multi-layered, networked configurations that are able to accommodate a range of entities including (inter)governmental, para-governmental, nongovernmental, and private organisations” (Collier 2018, p. 14). Digital power creates new policy spaces for smaller countries that might find new operational niches beyond territorial politics (Nye 2010), which seems to underpin Joseph Nye’s statement that “the largest powers are unlikely … to dominate this domain as much as they have others like sea, air, or space” (Nye 2010).

In the meantime, we agree with authors who underline the importance of human—as opposed to state-centric—perspectives on digital power (Nye 2010). This is what we may call digital biopolitics that is manifested through the ascending narrative of the ‘digital way of life’, and stretches digitalization far beyond its technical core and opens it up to the global discourses on human capital, human resources, resilience and sustainable development. The coronavirus crisis has therefore highlighted an important component of digital empowerment which is directly related to the concept of biopolitics in general and to Michel Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and responsibilization in particular. A core component of the ‘digital lifestyle’ is the much discussed yet still remaining understudied concept of individual responsibility as “the central objective of the biopolitics of modern democratic societies” (Siltaoja et al. 2015, p. 448). The extant literature points to such elements of responsibilization as “autonomy and choice, enterprising selves and governing at a distance” (Juhila et al. 2017, p. 19). In other words, responsibilization represents a particular form of soft “control that influences the behavior of individuals without directly intervening” (Hache 2007); alternatively, it might be seen as a “behavioral power” aimed at “construction of civility” (Peeters 2019, p. 59). For instance, legal systems of many countries presume workers’ individual responsibility “for their own safety at work”, as well as for their health conditions (Grey 2009, p. 328).

In both Estonian and Taiwanese discourses, one may find multiple references to the indispensability of citizens’ self-involvement into taking the utmost advantage of IT technologies for protecting their lives through acquiring and developing digital skills. This seems to be in line with the neoliberal understanding of “governance praxis that operates through ascribing freedom and autonomy to individuals and agents (e.g., as autonomous ‘consumers’) while simultaneously appealing to individual responsibility-taking, independent self-steering and ‘self-care, as opposed “to mere compliance with rules” (Shamir 2008, p. 7).

The COVID-19 pandemic has particularly actualized the importance of including digital components into the incipient debate on the ‘global health’ (Youde 2016). Pandemic response involves many rules at multiple levels, however. The state can restrict international trade and tourism, close national borders, impose lockdowns and quarantines, and mandate mask wearing. At the same time, Foucault’s concept of governmentality envisages a role for society to support the state’s efforts to ensure the welfare of the population (Foucault 1994, pp. 636–57). In digital democracies such as Estonia and Taiwan, technology has empowered society to contribute to the development of original solutions to vexing problems such as disinformation about COVID-19 or the distribution of masks.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic as a “state of exception” has raised issues pertaining to digital vulnerabilities, as well as to the flipside of IT technologies. This peculiar type of exceptionality is not exclusively defined by the political will of the sovereign power, and is co-shaped by grassroots groups of civil society. By facilitating remote working only for a section of the population, thus shielding them from the virus and allowing them to maintain their professional lives and income, digital technologies may “become part of a larger assemblage that perpetuates and increases social inequalities… [Thus] contact tracing apps …are not deemed effective unless 56% of the population uses them… confirming that technological solutions cannot fix social inequalities… “Contact tracing” normalizes surveillance in spheres extending beyond the public health emergency… placing so much emphasis on technological solutions risks depoliticizing the COVID-19 emergency” (Madianou 2020, pp. 2–3). The Estonian and Taiwanese cases meaningfully contribute to the incipient debates on digital sovereignty and digital biopolitics, which meet and interact with each other.

3. Estonia and Taiwan as Digital Powers

Estonia and Taiwan are small democracies at opposite ends of the world that face a precarious geopolitical environment which they partially offset with unusual digital power. They both have a difficult history with a large neighbor which has threatened their sovereignty and continue to wrestle with complex issues of identity politics (Obermeyer 2020, pp. 11–12). Both Estonia and Taiwan have sought partners in the West to mitigate the security threats they feel. Estonia has successfully integrated into European and Western institutions while the PRC has sharply limited Taiwan’s diplomatic space, though as we will see, its digital power has contributed to its soft power.

Estonia (pop. 1.3 million, area 17,462 square miles) has had an especially complicated relationship with its enormous neighbor, Russia. The Russian Empire absorbed Estonia in 1721 and the country did not become independent until 1918. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave Estonia to the Soviet Union which incorporated it by force in 1940. Estonia was annexed in 1944 and thousands of Estonians were sent to labor camps in the Soviet Union. In 1988, the Estonian Parliament declared the country’s sovereignty, supported by the nation’s “Singing Revolution.” Estonia became fully independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, though Moscow did not withdraw its last 16,000 troops (out of 80,000) until 1994. The Russian military also kept hold of a training site at its former submarine base until 1995 (Global Security.org n.d.). Since the 1990s, the issue of citizenship for the Russian population in Estonia, the Estonian language requirement, and attitudes in Estonia towards the Soviet Union have been flashpoints in relations between Tallinn and Moscow. Russian speakers make up about 25% of the population of Estonia. The United States never recognized Estonia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union and after independence the country quickly became involved in Western institutions, joining the European Union and NATO in 2004 (U.S. Embassy Estonia n.d.; BBC 2019).

The Republic of China (Taiwan) (pop. 23.7 million, area 13,974 square miles) has an even more fraught relationship with the People’s Republic of China, its neighbor across the Taiwan Straits, which claims it as a renegade province. The Republic of China, led by the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang or KMT) once ruled all of China after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. After a protracted struggle with the Chinese Communist Party, the Nationalists ultimately were defeated and fled Communist rule to the island of Taiwan, along with much of the country’s gold and cultural heritage artifacts. China tried unsuccessfully to retake the island by force in the 1950s but has not abandoned its pledge to “reunify” Taiwan. A 2005 law gives Mainland China the right to use force to do so if Taiwan should ever declare its independence and Taiwan reunification is considered to be a “core interest” of the Chinese government.

Taiwan initially represented China in the United Nations but withdrew in 1971 when the PRC acquired sufficient global support. At the time both the Republic of China and the PRC claimed to represent all of China and neither would accept the idea of “two Chinas.” Ever since then, Beijing has claimed the right to be the gatekeeper for Taiwan’s participation in international organizations and setting the terms for its participation as a non-state actor, such as Chinese Taipei in the Olympics. Although Taiwan had been an ally of the U.S., when the Nixon administration signed the Shanghai Communiqué in 1972 to begin a process of normalization with Beijing, the U.S. abandoned its former alliance with Taipei. As a condition of relations with the PRC, all countries have to give up ties to Taipei though most have unofficial embassies there. The U.S. also has legislative commitments to ensure Taiwan’s defense.

In the 1980s, Taiwan began a process of democratization, leading to the first democratic elections for president in 1996. Although 95% of Taiwanese are Han Chinese, identity has emerged as a flashpoint between Taiwan and the PRC. A February 2020 poll by Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation revealed that a record high of 83% of citizens of Taiwan identify themselves as Taiwanese, with only 5.3% identifying as Chinese and 6.7% identifying as both Taiwanese and Chinese (with 4.8% having no opinion). The numbers identifying as Chinese or both Taiwanese and Chinese fell by half since the fall of 2019 (Everington 2020). Nevertheless, the PRC is a key economic partner for Taiwan and 40% of its exports went to the mainland in 2019. Beijing’s hostility to the election and reelection of Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic People’s Party (DPP) has led to efforts in Taipei to diversify its trade away from China and reshore Taiwanese firms that are based there (Yip 2020).

3.1. Estonia’s Digital Revolution

The Estonian case nicely illustrates the ambivalent nature of the nexus of territorial and digital sovereignties. The business community in Estonia invests a lot of effort into developing innovative practices that stretch beyond the former and contribute to the latter. Estonia brands itself as a world leader in “digital revolution” (McLaughlin 2019), and in 2000 became the first country to declare internet access a basic human right. That same year it passed a law giving digital signatures equal weight to handwritten ones (Walt 2017). Skype is usually referred to as one of the best-known technologies of Estonian origin (Top Estonian Technologies Changing the World 2018). Estonia has been ranked as one of Europe’s strong innovators, according to the 2019 EU innovation scoreboards published by the European Commission (ERR 2019). Marten Kaevats, Estonian national digital advisor, has dubbed Estonia “the first country in the world to operate from the cloud” (Connected 2020).

The Estonian government has developed an e-residency program that has already created a global community of 58,000 Estonian e-residents—people of Estonian descent all across the world—with Finland, Russia, Germany, Ukraine and the U.S. with the the highest number of e citizens holding Estonian digital identity and forming a group of “Estonia’s friends.” They not only help make the country more visible in the world, but also constitute a group that could lobby on behalf of Estonian interests if needed (Blue 2019). The e-residency ID card facilitates financial operations of its holders irrespective of their domicile, and gives other practical advantages in trade, economy and banking. The government issued digital identity cards that can solve a number of problems for crowdfunding and alternative finance platforms, such as KYC-regulations [know your customer, i.e., customer identification], cross-border investments and e-voting for shareholders in equity crowdfunding projects (Kleverlaan 2015). E-residents established 7200 startups that employ 1300 persons, which since the launch of the program brought about 25 million euros of net revenue to the Estonian budget; a significant part of this sum goes for expensive medical operations (Rus.ERR 2019a). This illustrates how Estonian digital policies “reconcile the commercial goals of e-residency as a branding instrument” with the nationally-oriented agenda of the government (Tammpuu and Masso 2018, p. 555). The program was key to branding Estonia as “the new digital nation”1 open to globalization and incentivizing foreigners to do business in Estonia at a distance.

As a follow-up to the e-residency program, Estonian cyber specialists came up with the idea of “Estcoin,” a cryptocurrency that was supposed to complement the benefits of e-residency. However, the idea was dropped after the EU authorities saw it as contravening the Eurozone regulations. Another innovation that the Estonian government has launched in 2020 is “digital nomadic visa” designed to facilitate travel to and stay in Estonia for people who don’t have permanent jobs in this country yet who might be temporarily employed for online-related activities, including freelancers and part-time employees, especially in the IT sector (Duxbury 2020).

Among government officials, major support for digitalization came from former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and his successor, Kersti Kaljulaid, who is known as one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the development of IT technologies as a core of the Estonian national project. Estonia’s digital policies become more people-centric—and thus biopolitical—than territorial (“We have enough land, but not enough people,” an Estonian IT expert noticed) (Virtual Data Embassy Estonia 2015). They are aimed at overcoming the vulnerabilities arising from the country’s location through reaching beyond the national borders, and compensating for this geographic disadvantage with a de-territorialized digital expertise projectable in a global scale (Gold 2019a): “a government run from a cloud can’t be occupied” (Virtual Data Embassy Estonia 2015).

The novel forms of digital sovereignty derive from Estonia’s experience of being cyberattacked by Russia in 2007 in retaliation for the politically sensitive decision of the Estonian government to relocate the statue of Bronze Soldier from downtown Tallinn to a military cemetery.2 These attacks are widely referred to as a trigger for Estonia’s investments in its cybersecurity and digital power (Gold 2019b), including the hosting of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence.3 Yet the most innovative solutions challenge the traditional principles of territoriality, including “data localization rules, which mandate that data used to deliver services in a country must all be stored and processed within the borders of that country” (Weitzner 2018, p. 433). In light of Russia’s policies in what Moscow considers its “near abroad” (above all Russia’s military conflicts with Georgia and Ukraine), authorities in Tallinn started looking for technical options to move digital authentication and authorization services beyond the country’s borders. Estonia considered an option of a physical embassy for data in a friendly foreign country, which has successfully evolved into a project known as Data Embassy located in a high-security data center in Betzdorf, a commune in Luxembourg (Estonia to Open the World’s First Data Embassy in Luxemburg 2017). This project ensures the functioning of the Estonian state in times of a potential crisis (Tambur 2018).

Another good example would be the establishment of the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions aimed at developing X-Road, “the data exchange layer for information systems, as a technological and organizational environment enabling a secure Internet-based data exchange between information systems” (Estonia and Finland Started Common Development of X-Road Software Core 2018). The Institute started as an Estonian-Finnish joint venture grounded in close economic relations between the two neighbors that share not only geography, but also a similar business culture.

Therefore, the Estonian case presents itself at the intersection of territorial politics and digital empowerment, yet a harmony between the two is by no means warranted. Moreover, the idea of digital sovereignty was to a certain extent bent on a utopian vision of society with pupils studying from home, patients being treated remotely4, and non-residential customers being able to acquire full access to the Estonian banking system. A money laundering scandal that erupted in 2018, and affected several Estonia-based banking institutions, has made clear that shadow organizations may take advantage of the ‘digital utopia’ to conduct illicit transfers of millions of euros. The Danske Bank report concluded that its Estonian branch “had a large number of non-resident customers in Estonia that we should have never had, and that they carried out large volumes of transactions that should have never happened” (Findings of the Investigations Relating to Danske Bank’s Branch in Estonia 2018). In the aftermath of this incident, Estonian banks have drastically toughened their requirements for non-residents, which, in the words of an Estonian expert, may “kill the e-residency project” (Rus.ERR 2020a). The COVID-19 crisis has further contributed to placing some of the components of Estonian digital governance in a more controversial and problematic context.

3.2. Taiwan as an IT Powerhouse and Digital Democracy

Taiwan’s digital power is exhibited in two differing ways. First, Taiwan has been an important player in the production of information technology since the 1970s, when collaboration between Taiwanese scientists and Americans at RCA company with the support of Taipei officials launched its semiconductor industry (Sullivan-Walker 2020). Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), established in 1987 in Hsinchu, is now the world’s leading producer of integrated circuits. Despite China’s interest in producing more of its own chips, Taiwan’s companies continue to dominate the sector. The company’s A13 Bionic processor can now be found in the iPhone 11 and is crucial for Huawei’s 5G plans (Consumer Choice Center 2019).

Taiwan’s semiconductors are now central to supply chains in both China and the United States. This is an enviable position, attesting to the industry’s vigor, but it also creates vulnerabilities for Taiwan. The semiconductor industry accounts for 15% of Taiwan’s GDP (Sullivan-Walker 2020) and currently China and Hong Kong account for 60% of sales for the Taiwanese semiconductor industry (Ma 2020). Moreover, 70% of production is located on the Chinese mainland. In a move to decrease Taiwan’s dependence on the PRC in its supply chains, in January 2019 President Tsai created incentives for companies to relocate to the island. Within a little more than a year, some 189 companies had participated, involving $25 billion in investment (Ihara 2020).

The U.S.-China trade war has created an even trickier situation for Taiwanese companies, which are being pressured by Beijing to remain in the PRC and encouraged by the U.S. to open plants in the United States. In May 2020, the U.S. imposed sanctions on foreign companies that provide semiconductors to the PRC and Taiwan’s TSMC halted sales to Huawei in response. TMSC also announced it would invest $12 billion in a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Arizona (Sullivan-Walker 2020).

Taiwanese semiconductor companies have been eager to comply with U.S. sanctions as they depend on U.S. products for 80% of their intellectual property. (Ma 2020, p. 7). Labor costs have risen in the PRC, making operations there increasingly less cost-effective. Moreover, China hopes to reduce its dependence on American firms and U.S.-affiliated tech companies, though in the short term it has stockpiled about a year’s worth of semiconductors.

Second, Taiwan’s entry into the IT field coincided with its transition to democracy, and today technology is used in Taiwan not just to simplify procedures through e-governance but also to achieve social consensus, democratic participation, transparency and accountability. In recognition of its creative efforts to marshal technology, Taiwan ranked fourth in innovation after Germany, the United States and Switzerland in the World Economic Forum’s 2019 National Competitiveness Survey (World Economic Forum 2019, p. 538).

Since the PRC restricts Taiwan’s diplomatic space, preventing it from joining most international organizations and seeking to reduce the number of states that recognize it, Taiwan also derives soft power from its success as a democracy. Taiwanese officials, especially under President Tsai, have used IT tools to deepen Taiwan’s democracy, providing a sharp contrast with the mainland which has relied on technology to create a surveillance state (Pei 2020).

Taiwan is now completing the fifth stage of its 20-year commitment to develop e-government and become a “smart power.” Estonia has been an important inspiration for Taiwan in its creation of a digital eID, the development of a database connecting Taiwanese ministries, the use of blockchain to reduce cyber-risks, and creating a one-stop platform for government services. The next stage, planned for 2020–25 is to create a smart government using AI, cloud computing, and other tools to improve government decision-making and increase public participation with the aim of developing a sense of co-governance between private citizens and the public sector. Taiwan’s National Development Council uses the example of disease prevention and disaster communication to explain the potential impact of smart government decision-making. As we will see below, these innovations greatly enhanced Taiwan’s response to COVID-19 (Pan 2018).

Technological innovation is just one piece of Taiwan’s efforts to use technological tools to achieve social consensus and deepen democracy. An equally important component is the role of society in pushing for such changes, particularly the role of Taiwan’s “civic hackers” who sought to use the internet to provide greater transparency and participation in politics. Protests in 2014 by the Sunflower Movement against an effort by Taiwan’s legislature to fast-track a measure to deepen cooperation with the mainland with inadequate debate had revealed polarization within society. The bill was defeated and one of the activists, Audrey Tang, a former entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, is now Digital Minister of Information. More importantly the spirit of the movement lives on in g0v-zero,5 a civic-tech collective that seeks to expand public participation through tools such as vTaiwan platform, an effort to use social media to forge consensus in society and create dialogue between society and government ministries (Horton 2018; Leonard 2020; Tang 2019b). Each of Taiwan’s ministries now has participation officers tasked with engaging the public in collaborative efforts (Tang 2019b).

At the same time, awareness of Taiwan’s unique vulnerabilities (to natural disasters as well as to military threats and cyberattacks from the PRC) has created a security rationale for innovation in the cyber domain. As Taiwan was first initiating its effort to expand internet usage in the late 1990s two events called attention to the vulnerabilities in its telecommunications infrastructure. The first was a severe power outage in July 1999 which interrupted communications across the north of Taiwan. A few months later, on 21 September 1999, a major earthquake took place which led to a massive power outage (Risk Management Solutions 2000, p. 11; Stokes 2018, p. 17). During that same year, Taiwan first experienced Chinese hacking, when Taiwan’s President Lee Teng-hui said that China and Taiwan have special state-to-state relationship and negotiations should take place between two states, a position that the PRC rejects as indicating support for Taiwan independence. Chinese nationalists hacked Taiwan government websites, replacing them with the PRC flag and statements about Taiwan being an indivisible part of China.

Since then Taiwan has repeatedly experienced hacking attacks from the PRC and takes information warfare very seriously, creating a number of institutions to address the threat. Bolt and Brenner argue that Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable because the PRC may conclude that attacks on Taiwan’s telecommunications would cause little damage, involve little warning, and may not be viewed as seriously by the international community as a military attack (Bolt and Brenner 2004, pp. 141–4), as Estonia experienced in 2007. Moreover, such attacks would leave Taiwan more isolated. Although the U.S. assists Taiwan with its defense, including in preparing for information warfare and cyber-attacks, the American strategy of strategic ambiguity only accentuates Taiwan’s vulnerability to information warfare.

Taiwan’s government responded to PRC hacking by creating the National Information and Communication Security Taskforce (NICST) to facilitate interagency communication and the National Center for Cyber Security Technology (NCCST) to develop technological measures and improve cybersecurity (Huang 2020b, p. 103). In 2015 (after Chinese hacking in response to Taiwan’s support for Hong Kong’s ‘umbrella’ protest movement) Taiwan President Ma Ying-Jeou created a cybersecurity division within the National Security Council. His successor, President Tsai, set up the National Information and Communication Security Office in August 2016 in the National Security Council and the Executive Yuan established the Department of Cyber Security to administer the nation’s cybersecurity. In June 2017 the Ministry of National Defense announced the launch of the Information, Communication, and Electronic Force Command to prepare for cyberthreats from abroad. In May 2018, Taiwan’s legislature passed the Information and Communication Management Act, which outlines the basic guidelines and standard operating procedures for how the public and private sectors should regularly report cybersecurity issues to the governing authorities. The Act also provides incentives for the private sector to develop new technologies (Huang 2020b, p. 104).

Bolt and Brenner argue that “a further source of vulnerability is the lack of consensus on Taiwan’s future within Taiwan itself. The rise of democracy in Taiwan brought greater strategic uncertainty. While some citizens call for independence, others desire speedy reunification with the mainland. The majority of Taiwanese prefer the status quo of maintaining stability but leaving Taiwan’s long-term status unresolved (Bolt and Brenner 2004, p. 142). While a March 2020 public opinion poll showed little support for reunification (0.8%, down from 1.1% in 2016) (Hsiao 2020), the concern about the need for consensus was a driver for some of the digital innovations noted above.

Even as greater consensus emerges within Taiwan’s society, Beijing continues to try to influence local and national elections, in an effort to boost the fortunes of KMT candidates who are viewed as more supportive of cross-straits cooperation and to dampen enthusiasm for the DPP (U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission 2019, p. 453). A study of Chinese influence attempts during the 2020 presidential election (where President Tsai (DPP) was reelected in a landslide) shows wide-ranging efforts to spread disinformation, sow doubts about the integrity of the elections and take advantage of Taiwan’s open press. Right before the January 11th election, Taiwan’s legislature passed the Anti-Infiltration Act to curb the PRC’s interference (Aspinwall 2020). President Tsai’s team was well prepared to address mainland disinformation efforts and chose to frame these activities as a virus afflicting society, rather than demonizing specific actors or parties (Huang 2020a, p. 32).

4. Tackling the Pandemic with Digital Power

In this section we look at how the two countries used their digital power to combat the pandemic. We relate the empirical analysis of the cases of Estonia and Taiwan with a broader debate on the extent to which IT technologies of e-governance might be effective tools in combating COVID-19 (Moscovici 2019).

Table 1. Digital Tools and COVID-19 Outcomes in Estonia and Taiwan: A Summary of the Findings.

	Estonia	Taiwan
Population	1.3 million	23.7 million
Territory	17,462 square miles	13,974 square miles
Number of COVID-19 cases (as of 31 December 2021)	237,099	16,915
Number of COVID-19 deaths (as of 31 December 2021)	1916	850
Digital Tools against COVID-19	App for contact tracing, e-prescription system, KoroonaKaart online information hub, Koroonatest self-assessment questionnaire, national chatbot SUVE for pandemic Q&A	Medicloud for patient data connected to customs data, Intelligent Electronic Fence (for self-quarantine), app for mask location, zhendejiade bot to combat pandemic disinformation

below summarizes our findings.

4.1. Estonia’s Responses to COVID-19

The COVID-19 crisis has underscored many of the advantages of Estonia’s digital power, though of course the nature of the pandemic threat is radically different from the geopolitical confrontation in which Estonia could have been a frontline state. Estonia reported few cases or deaths until late 2020, when it experienced two spurts in the spring and fall of 2021. However, asof December 2021, with the onset of the Omicron variant, Estonia recorded 237,099 cases and 1916 deaths.6

One example of Estonia’s digital power is the “Hack the Crisis” hackathon7 that became an incubator of practical ideas of crisis management; with the help of the 100% online free accelerator, “Salto Growth Camp: EMERGEncy”, 15 selected startups from all around the world received assistance to market their product globally (Tambur 2020). Another example is ‘Share Force One’, a workforce sharing platform that connects B2B sides for temporary workforce exchange, and operates in partnership with the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund.8 Estonian e-prescription system was instrumental in minimizing physical contacts between patients and doctors, and making self-isolation more functional9. Estonian authorities have been using a chatbot developed by local startups to answer the many questions its citizens have about COVID-19 (Flinders 2020). When it comes to the current debates on the digital surveillance and control fostered by the COVID-19 crisis, the Estonian government is committed to the liberal principles of privacy in data management: the logic of the state is that “the more data we collect, the faster we can decide on lifting restrictions” (Rus.ERR 2020b).

Estonia’s record of using its digital power to combat the pandemic might be explained by the well-developed concept of public-private partnership (Wolcott 2020). On the public side, COVID-19 has elucidated the vital importance of different forms of responsibilization as an indispensable element of governmentality. The widely promoted Estonian anti-coronavirus app assumed that its users would act responsibly: a person diagnosed positive is expected to voluntarily launch the app to identify the circle of his or her recent contacts, to whom the recommended action will be communicated (Maran 2020). The three major projects emerged from the anti-COVID hackathon—the KoroonaKaart online information hub, the self-assessment Koroonatest questionnaire, and the national chatbot SUVE which answers questions about the emergency (Meaker 2020)—all envisage responsible and proactive citizens capable of taking care of their health conditions and health security. The same goes for other apps dealing with telemedicine or with patient-generated sick leave requests that are forwarded to the patient’s employer and then followed up by a physician (Haynes 2020). This is what Urmas Reinsaalu, Estonian Foreign Minister, dubbed “human-centric digital transformation” that is expected to provide technical possibilities for achieving a biopolitical goal of integrating into the ‘digital life’ the most vulnerable social groups (Close the Digital Divides: The Digital Response to COVID-19 2020). Yet ultimately it is up to citizens to “embrace digital solutions” (Silaskova and Takahashi 2020) and make them parts of their everyday routine. In addition, of course, the development of medical solutions requires quick reactions and new approaches from the medical staff (Saarmann 2020), which is also part of the biopolitical paradigm of responsibilization.

Progress in IT technology in Estonia has another important biopolitical facet related to the further integration of the Estonian majority and the Russophone minority. As Sten-Kristian Saluveer, an active member of Estonian startup community suggested, for the new IT generation the highly divisive and conflictual issues of the past—related to the Soviet occupation and mass deportation of Estonians to Siberia—will not play a crucial role any more (YouTube 2019). The fight against COVID-19 has contributed to this perspective: with the growth of the online audience of Estonian Russian-language media starting from March 2020, many local commentators concluded that the pandemic pushed Russophone citizens and residents into the Estonian information and digital spaces, which is a key component of a broader social and cultural integration in the country (Rus.ERR 2020c).

There are several issues that need to be considered at this juncture. One concerns the functionality of Estonia’s digital sovereignty in times of the crisis. On the one hand, as many observers aver, “Estonia’s digital state has enabled life in the country to continue, largely uninterrupted. For instance, compared to countries where bureaucracy has been forced to grind to a halt, Estonia stands in stark contrast, as its governance systems remain largely unaffected”. Yet on the other hand, it is an autonomous, resilient and responsible civil society which primarily matters as a source of major policy initiatives related to digitalization. In this vein, Irja Lutsar, the former head of Estonia’s governmental coronavirus scientific advisory board, has been much less focusing on “digital solutions” in crisis management, and much more on “a lower-tech mixture of trust in government and social pressure that meant people were adhering to lockdown orders. Digital state could only play a supporting role in this pandemic.”10

Another issue concerns the functioning of the digital sphere in exceptional times. President Kaljulaid has strongly emphasized the technical progress in the Estonian educational system as a key component of successful digitalization (Altosaar 2020), particularly in secondary schools (How Did Estonia Become a New Role Model in Digital Education 2020). However, the mass-scale distance learning during the peak cycles of the pandemic has sparked a vivid debate in pedagogical circles and had a juridical consequence: in October 2021 the Chancellor of Law has pointed to “a lack of legal grounds” for shifting the educational process to an online mode on the basis of schools’ self-assessment of the epidemiological situation (ERR 2021a).

When it comes to higher education, the COVID-19 crisis has created preconditions for reducing the number of non-EU students. In 2020 the Ministry of Interior, being under the control of the Estonian nationalist party named EKRE, started working in this direction before the crisis, but the outbreak of COVID-19 gave the conservative part of the government a trump card for partly implementing their restrictive policy blueprints. Furthermore, in July 2020 Tallinn Technical University refused to matriculate about 500 students, mostly from non-European countries, referring to the risk of contamination (ERR 2020), which sparked an intense debate in the media and showed that some institutions of higher education were hesitant to rely on digital solutions when organizing the teaching process.

The COVID-19 pandemic boosted voices critical of Estonia’s digital capabilities to effectively tackle the coronavirus challenge. Thus, according to the Comptroller General Report of 2019, two thirds of Estonian hospitals consider the e-health system burdensome and requiring further optimization (Rus.ERR 2019b). The Report also mentioned that in the Digital Economy and Society Index Estonia ranks only seventh among EU member states and is outperformed by Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Malta and Ireland (The Digital Economy and Society Index 2020). In the words of a digital governance researcher, Estonian model of digital sovereignty “does not work well, does not provide meaningful statistical information for the government, is not part of the EU interoperability contact-tracing protocol and is now stuck in a long, costly and challenging procurement…due to the reliance of the service provision from the private sector and Estonia’s decentralised government design, changes and innovations take time to proliferate throughout the system, thus slowing down the state’s ability to rapidly address evolving situations. It is paradoxical to some extent: what makes Estonian digital governance work well during more stable times was largely responsible for inhibiting Estonia’s digital response to the pandemic” (McBride 2021).

This type of criticism is also applicable to the vulnerabilities of Estonian digital data protection. In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, in July 2021, personal names, ID codes and photos of over 280,000 citizens were hacked due to what was qualified as an error in the state portal system (ERR 2021b). This case should be seen in a broader context of earlier major incidents with Estonian ID cards of 2011 and 2017 that were related to technical mistakes made by a Swiss company contracted by the Estonian state for producing identity documents. From the vantage point of digital sovereignty, the major source of security vulnerability was the outsourcing of the technical side of ID card production to a chip manufacturer that generated keys outside the security chip, and could not be directly controlled by the Estonian government (ERR 2021c).

Another sort of controversy cropped up in December 2021 when the State Court ruled that the decision of the Estonian parliament to switch to online mode from 10 November to 25 November 2021 was “illegal”, since, according to the ruling, legislative work at a distance has compromised free and open discussions among people’s representatives who, being public servants, must perform their duties—as the police and military staff do—physically, unless the state of emergency is legally introduced in the entire country. This legal case, apart from illustrating a thin edge between the norm and the exception, is also indicative of the limits of virtual forms of politics…

Therefore, as the first two years of the fight against coronavirus made clear, the Estonian government was fully capable of preserving its democratic integrity, and avoided harsh measures that were practiced in many European countries. Among them are curfew, access to shopping malls by QR codes, prohibition of foreign travel for employees of educational institutions, mandatory wearing of masks in the streets, or closure of some urban facilities (for example, gyms) even for vaccinated customers. Estonia protested against a more restrictive entry policy of the Finnish government, and generally kept its border crossing regime relatively liberal. Estonia could also avoid mass scale protests against anti-pandemic measures. In the meantime, the experience of fighting COVID-19 has elucidated the importance of biopolitical components of digital power, primarily a sense of responsible behavior that is extended to the acceptance of and compliance with the limitations and restrictions imposed by the government.

4.2. Taiwan’s Response to COVID-19

Despite being excluded from the World Health Organization due to the PRC’s opposition, Taiwan was one of a few countries to successfully confront COVID-19 and the first to inform the WHO of reports of the disease on 31 December 2019. After being one of the hardest hit by SARS with 671 cases and 84 deaths (WHO 2003), Taiwan emerged relatively unscathed from the current pandemic, reporting a total of 16,915 cases and 850 deaths.11 This is even more surprising considering that up to 2 million Taiwanese reside on the mainland and 2.7 million people traveled from the PRC to Taiwan in 2019 (Xu 2018).

Certain lessons learned from SARS in 2002–03 played a role, such as the challenge of contact tracing and quarantining a mobile and possibly asymptomatic population (Chen et al. 2005). The following year a multi-agency Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), headed by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, was established. The CECC went into operation on 20 January 2020, one day before Taiwan reported its first case of COVID-19 (Lin et al. 2020a, p. 1508). In addition to this institutional capacity, the Tsai government had a lot of credibility to handle the pandemic, since the vice-president was a prominent epidemiologist, regular public briefings were shared online, and a legal basis had already been prepared for government management of pandemics (Wang et al. 2020; Chao and Cheng 2020, p. 11). Nevertheless, Taiwan’s success with COVID-19 is related in no small degree to its digital power.

A technocratic approach to pandemic risk management has been credited with developing the necessary digital toolbox to mount an effective preventive and proactive response to COVID-19. Although analyses highlight the role of the administrative regulatory state (Lin et al. 2020b), Taiwan’s governmentality involved a mixture of state-led measures, leadership by experts, and involvement by society (Ingram 2010, p. 294). Discussions of governmentality usually focus on the particular practices of power, especially sovereign power and disciplinary power, as well as control over the biopolitical. As we will see, there are mechanisms for state control but also independent actions by the technology community contributed to mutually beneficial solutions. For Taiwan, which is prevented from declaring its own sovereignty, control over biopolitics necessarily involves a networked approach.

Government policies, institutions, and laws created an elaborate pandemic response framework (Lin et al. 2020b) with which medical experts and members of the community were then able to collaborate in their response to COVID-19. The components of this framework were established well before the outbreak of the pandemic. For example, Taiwan has had a low-cost universal single-payer national health insurance plan since 1995 (Chen 2018). Patients have a health insurance card that they need to obtain care, and the card is also used by doctors and hospitals to obtain medical data about the patients (Emanuel et al. 2020). Beginning in 2018 the National Health Insurance Administration created an app called MediCloud for storing patient data in the cloud. After the first cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed in Taiwan, the CECC connected Medicloud to Customs and Immigration databases in order to obtain key information about an individual’s travel history (Chi 2020).

Government information gathering initiatives depended on the cooperation of the citizenry, as well as mobile phone operators. In an August 2020 webinar, Digital Minister Audrey Tang described the state-society interaction during the pandemic as collective intelligence (Tang 2020) which was possible due to the high level of trust between the government and its citizens. This combination of big data and “responsibilization” of the population facilitated contact tracing and isolation of COVID-19 patients, as well as the effective use of initially limited testing resources (Emanuel et al. 2020). Big data, as well as cooperation from a wide range of data from tour companies, credit card companies, and mobile phone carriers enabled the CECC to determine that 3,000 passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship who disembarked in Keelung, Taiwan for a day trip on January 31st had 627, 386 possible contacts. Authorities then sent each one SMS messages regarding symptom monitoring and self-quarantining (Chen et al. 2020).

There was no national lockdown in Taiwan and citizens who were considered to be at high risk were asked to self-quarantine at home for 14 days. In early February 2020, the CECC launched an Intelligent Electronic Fence System in partnership with the phone companies. The system uses GPS to track the location of quarantined people; in the event an individual cannot be located in two consecutive attempts, a warning is sent to the person in question, the CECC, the local government authorities and the police (Chi 2020). On 14 February 2020 travelers were asked to complete a health declaration form by scanning a QR code. This sped up immigration procedures by sending their mobile form by SMS (Wang et al. 2020).

As in the United States and many other countries, one of the early challenges was finding a sufficient supply of masks and personal protective equipment. Taiwan began by banning the export of masks and rationing those available for domestic use, while ramping up domestic production. In the interim, the IT community responded to frustration within the community regarding the difficulty of buying masks. Technology collectives, in collaboration with the government, began developing software to identify supplies of masks at local pharmacies and convenience stores. Members of the broader community assisted by cross-checking addresses of the store locations. Ultimately Taiwan unveiled a mask-buying app that enabled citizens to use their health insurance card to preorder masks and pick them up at local stores (Chao and Cheng 2020, p. 12; Kimbrough and Chou 2020).

Taiwan’s information strategy also addressed the ongoing disinformation threat from the mainland. Prior to COVID-19, in 2016 developers funded by the g0v.tw tech collective created a bot called zhende jiade translated as real or fake. Taiwan’s netizens can “friend” the bot on Line, the social media platform which 90% of the population uses. When a netizen encounters suspected disinformation, it can be passed along to the bot which will then inform the sender if this was fake news. (Monaco 2017, p. 14). In contrast with Russia, which relies on bots for disinformation, to spread fake news in Taiwan China mobilizes netizens, only some of whom are paid, to advocate for the island’s reunification with the mainland. Their comments are easily detectable when using the simplified Mandarin characters since Taiwan uses the traditional complex characters.

Nevertheless, during the COVID-19 pandemic Taiwan faced the same PRC disinformation campaign experienced elsewhere, which blamed the U.S. for the pandemic, downplayed the severity of the disease, and praised the PRC’s response. One angle specific to Taiwan involved spreading rumors that COVID-19 was worse than the Tsai government represented. In response, government officials and NGOs took a variety of steps to increase trust in official communications. The CECC live-streamed daily press briefings and kept people informed on the ubiquitous Line platform. Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control set up a hotline for reporting suspicious information and the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation bureau was tasked with following up. NGOs such as Doublethink Lab, Taiwan FactCheck Center and MyGoPen (the latter two certified by the International Fact-Checking Network) also investigated suspicious reports (Shen 2020, July 24). Although Taiwan’s officials are sanguine about their people’s resilience and ability to debunk disinformation, some experts see vulnerabilities in Line (which does not have its own ability to counter disinformation as other platforms do) and opportunities for PRC disinformation using alternative channels, such as YouTube (Shen 2020, July 24).

China’s disinformation efforts directed at Taiwan during the pandemic thus far have been counterproductive. Nationalism has played a significant role in pandemic responses globally and this has played a role in encouraging social solidarity in Taiwan. For Taiwan’s leaders, an effective response to COVID-19 was very much about enhancing sovereignty and using soft power to expand its diplomatic space at a time when the PRC is seeking to restrict it. In contrast with other countries, Taiwan was self-sufficient in producing masks and did not need to rely on China’s Health Silk Road diplomacy; to the contrary, Taiwan engaged in its own mask diplomacy. (Zhang and Savage 2020, p. 473). This has led to expressions of support for Taiwan’s membership in the WHO by the U.S. and other countries (Lee 2020), as well as unprecedented cooperation between the U.S. and Taiwan in combating COVID-19 (Wong 2020). For the Trump Administration, support for Taiwan and praise for its pandemic response fit well in its narrative about China during a time of heightened bilateral tensions. However, the U.S. show of support also has the potential to exacerbate Taiwan’s vulnerability, as Chinese jets intruded into Taiwanese airspace during the August 9, 2020 visit by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar (Everington 2020). Both the Trump and Biden Administrations (unsuccessfully) urged the World Health Assembly to include Taiwan. With China’s record number of air intrusions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), the Biden Administration has displayed strong support, including inviting Taiwan to the December 2021 Summit for Democracy and providing it with 4 million vaccine doses in the second half of 2021.

4.3. Digital Power and Democracy

A remarkable feature of the pandemic responses in democratic Taiwan and Estonia was the relative lack of controversy over the extension of the reach of the state in the use of digital power to combat COVID-19. In Giorgio Agamben’s view this is an example of the normalization of “the state of exception” that the pandemic has brought about (Agamben 2020). While typically biopower is seen as the unwelcome reach of the state to control matters of life and death, in the case of COVID-19 Taiwanese and Estonians were prepared to relinquish considerable control over their personal data and movement, in the case of those quarantined, in the interest of the public good.

In Estonia there is a general understanding of the usefulness of digital technologies for tracking the spread of infection and for helping to better organize distance learning and online working. Public discussions sparked by COVID-19 are centered around people’s fundamental rights and mostly concern the efficacy of governance and the distribution of decision-making powers; very often the government is criticized not for its undue intrusion into private lives, but for its lack of data (for example, concerning travelers arriving from abroad and their itineraries, and residents assigned to quarantine). During the entire lockdown period the focus of public debates was not on excessive governmental interference, but on inciting civil responsibility. In particular, for the Estonian startup community as an important part of civil society the pandemic crisis was an opportunity to mobilize its technical and digital resources for the sake of national resilience and well-being.

Prior to the pandemic, privacy advocates in Taiwan expressed concern about the potential for abuses in government monitoring of thousands of social media accounts, allegedly in response to the threat from the mainland. Although the Communications Protection and Surveillance Act prohibits unlawful infringement of privacy in telecommunications, there are no such protections for digital media (Chung 2018). A 2019 survey by Mozilla of Taiwan’s Internet health showed that 85.85% of respondents of all ages were concerned with data monopoly, compared to 77.5% with misleading information and just 49.7% with privacy risks (49.7%), although 76.1% supported greater action to protect privacy. According to the survey, respondents under 29 were much less sensitive to concerns about data privacy and the growing control by tech companies over personal information (Market Insider 2019). Older respondents have greater memory of the period of White Terror and authoritarian rule in Taiwan (1947–1987) when political speech was suppressed. Concerns about internet privacy, therefore, touch on sensitive issues involved in the ongoing reconciliation within Taiwan’s society with its authoritarian past (Shattuck 2017).

Although big data and the effective amalgamation of travel and health data were so crucial to the effective response to COVID-19, a number of human rights organizations in Taiwan have expressed reservations about the planned roll out of an eID in March 2023, fearing its consequences for privacy and the potential for government abuse and data security risks. In this case, 200 experts signed a petition opposing the e-id and calling for consultation on the issue and legislation protecting digital privacy (Hioe 2020). Human rights activists in Taiwan, in particular, emphasized the importance of identifying an endpoint for government access of personal data, provide remedies for individuals who believed their rights were violated, and maintain a high level of transparency about government use of data (Taiwan Association for Human Rights 2020).

Some see the technological collectivism that inspired the development of digital governance in Taiwan as a way of engaging with society to address the scope of e-government (Hioe 2020). Public health expert Chunhuei Chi explained the willingness in Taiwan to allow their government to use their data to combat COVID-19 by stating that “the critical reason that most Taiwanese accept this breach of privacy was a very high level of trust between the public and the government. The CECC is a model of communitas that has both the highest level of power to coordinate national epidemic control, while also being immensely transparent and responsive in its decision making” (Chi 2020).

Taiwan’s success story met its first major challenge in May 2021, when the Delta variant hit the island at a time when vaccines were only first becoming available. In April 2021 Taiwan had registered 1128 COVID cases since the start of the pandemic and just 16 deaths. By the end of May, however, there were more than 600 cases a day. Even during this peak infection period, Taiwan did not declare a national emergency, though the CECC raised the national alert level to 3 (out of 4), the highest level reached during the entire span of the pandemic to date. The surge in cases would quickly abate by the beginning of August, when new cases returned to their usual number of approximately 10 per day. Observers attribute the sharp spike in COVID cases to overconfidence, resulting in premature relaxation of quarantine requirements on pilots returning from overseas and a reduction in testing. Taiwan then rapidly returned to prior methods, including mask mandates, bans on indoor gatherings and nonessential services, and remote teaching, which, in addition to restrictions on incoming travelers, would serve to end the surge in cases (Tiberghien and Zhao 2021).

Despite the Tsai government’s ability to keep case numbers down for the most part in 2021 while avoiding lockdowns and maintaining 6% economic growth, the DPP’s poll numbers began to decline, and with it trust in the government’s handling of the pandemic. Initial polling of the government’s handling of the pandemic in February 2020 found 85.8% of respondents were satisfied with its performance (ETToday News Cloud 2020). However, a poll conducted by a Taiwanese television channel during the surge in COVID cases in June 2021 reported that 49% of respondents were dissatisfied with President Tsai’s performance. Taiwan’s late access to vaccines was a large part of this–57% expressed dissatisfaction with the vaccine rollout (TVBS 2021). The Tsai government’s handling of the COVID pandemic will be tested at the polls between the DPP and KMT as early as 2022, providing a democratic check by the public on official handling of the pandemic.

Pandemic exhaustion has taken a toll on poll numbers of many democratic leaders, but in Taiwan’s case the data shows two interesting findings. One is that COVID has continued to highlight growing distrust of the mainland—a key factor in the delay in Taiwan’s access to vaccines had to do with a Shanghai company’s potential role in supplying the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, requiring the negotiation of an agreement between the Chinese firm and Taiwanese companies after the PRC interfered with a Taiwan government purchase (Tiberghien and Zhao 2021). Indeed, 33% of respondents in the poll said they would not take a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine produced in the mainland (TVBS 2021). Although the PRC offered its own vaccines to Taiwan, the Tsai government refused them due to safety concerns and Beijing’s position on excluding Taiwan from the WHA.

The consensus within Taiwan on the use of digital tools to combat COVID-19 also has its limits, however, as the pushback against a digital ID in Taiwan has shown. Public opposition—even among DPP legislators—led to an indefinite postponement of the planned roll-out of the e-ID in July 2021 (Ngerng 2021). Critics pointed to inadequate information security and legislative measures in combining data from a variety of government databases, as well as national security concerns involving the main contractor for the project which is involved in projects in the PRC (OFC Lab 2021). Taiwan plans to set up a Ministry of Digital Development in 2022 to address some of these concerns.

5. Conclusions

For Taiwan, cyberspace has typically been seen as a domain where it is at a disadvantage in cyberwarfare, against a much stronger opponent. Viewing cyberspace as a domain for a societal battle against a pandemic, in terms of digital power, however, reveals a new side of Taiwan’s capabilities, drawing on emerging consensus within society over the acceptability of admittedly intrusive digital tools in the interest of the public good in a health emergency (De Kloet et al. 2020).

Early predictions about the superiority of authoritarian responses, particularly China’s strongarm tactics, proved premature (Duchâtel et al. 2020, p. 8). The same goes for Russia, which in no way served as an example of successful anti-pandemic policy, even among the Estonian Russophone population. While some studies found that a country’s system of government was irrelevant to the effectiveness of national pandemic response, others saw the relative successes in Taiwan and South Korea in battling COVID-19 as a triumph of Asian democratic values (Traub 2020).

While agreeing that authoritarian states could also mount a successful response to the pandemic, some analysts note that China’s use of digital technology was very different from that of Asian democracies in that China’s “prevention and control” (fankong) system relies on widespread surveillance by its public security apparatus (Greitens and Gewirtz 2020). While authoritarian states such as China and Russia could impose lockdowns and use their existing surveillance technology and apparatus, Taiwan and Estonia used digital tools as a means of avoiding more draconian measures. For example, given its history of martial law, Taiwan opted to avoid a lockdown and used digital tools to enforce quarantines on infected or exposed persons (Duchâtel et al. 2020, p. 119).

Taiwan, Estonia, as well as South Korea and Australia, were among the few democracies to use digital tools to successfully combat COVID-19. Other democracies such as New Zealand faced privacy restrictions on information sharing with government agencies and resorted to lockdowns and border controls to achieve a successful response (O’Connor et al. 2021, p. S224). As we have shown in Estonia and Taiwan, digital tools are seen as securing biopolitical sovereignty in the face of external threats and empowering citizens through responsibilization and public-private partnerships. Moreover, Victor Cha has suggested that, despite tradeoffs over privacy, citizens in some democracies—especially in East Asia—see digital tools as a public good in that they provide greater autonomy (avoiding lockdowns, for example), strengthen the social contract, enhance information-sharing, and inspire confidence (Cha 2020, p. 12).

This study of the COVID-19 outcomes in Estonia and Taiwan sets the scene for a future research on cyber vulnerability and digital power in a broader sense. Pandemics are the great equalizer in global politics, afflicting large and small states alike, authoritarian regimes and democracies in equal measure. We now see “a transformation of a world from relative national capability to one of equalised global vulnerability” (Kirton and Cooper 2009, p. 326). For Taiwan and Estonia, the application of digital power to the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a reframing of vulnerability. Geopolitical vulnerability to cyberattack has been seen as the Achilles heel for both but in the context of the struggle to tame COVID-19, their digital power has revealed societal resilience and reserves of strength in the biopolitical sphere. These cases raise interesting questions about the nature of vulnerability and resilience of democracies in addressing biopolitical threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic.