I think Taiwan's economy needs an overall structural readjustment. Our new model focuses on innovation and research. This is different from our growth model in the past, which was centered on the manufacturing industry.

People feel anxious, especially when we have to wonder whether the president, Taiwan's democratically elected president, will be addressed as president. If he cannot even defend his own title, what can he defend for us?

I am not clear what the U.S. means when they use the term "entity." For us here in Taiwan, we believe that we are a country, a democratic country.

China is still our largest trading partner; however, complementarity between our economies is decreasing. We had the ability to organize a manufacturing process, and then we moved our manufacturing capability to China to make use of their labor pool.

I think Taiwan's economy needs an overall structural readjustment. Our new model focuses on innovation and research. This is different from our growth model in the past, which was centered on the manufacturing industry.

For years, Taiwan has been dominated politically by a single party, the Kuomintang. People now want the place to be more democratic. They want to place more emphasis on human rights and transparency in terms of government decision-making. This is different from the way the government conducted business in the days when this was pretty much an authoritarian place.

I think that my emergence as a leader is closely related to the development of Taiwan's democracy. Taiwan's democracy was a gradual development. It was done from the bottom up. Therefore a lot of the more successful political leaders come from civil society, those that are closer to the grass-roots level of the public.