In few countries of the world is journalism as professionally intricate, politically risky, and socially challenging as in China. And because of China’s position in the world, in few countries is journalism’s practice as far-reaching in its consequences. In this context, the career of sixty-one-year-old HU SHULI is truly exemplary. HU comes from a distinguished line of journalists: her mother was senior editor of Workers’ Daily in Beijing; her grandfather was an editor of a Shanghai newspaper; and a grand uncle was a publisher and the deputy minister of culture before the Cultural Revolution. While HU’s family fell from grace during the Cultural Revolution, HU stayed in the stream of events. She joined the Red Guards and later the People’s Liberation Army, graduated from Beijing’s People’s University, and started her journalistic career by working for Workers’ Daily.

In 1987, a five-month sojourn as a fellow of the World Press Institute opened HU’s eyes to Western media. Upon her return, she published the first book which introduced Chinese audiences to the operations of professional journalism as practiced in the United States. China Business Times subsequently tapped her to serve as their international editor where she served for six years. In 1998 she established and edited Caijing, a glossy business magazine whose circulation rose to 225,000 because of the quality of its coverage and its groundbreaking investigative reporting. Even among those they investigated, Caijing staff were widely acknowledged for their discipline, thoroughness, and integrity—standards which HU uncompromisingly demanded of herself and her colleagues.

In a media environment where the very idea of “investigative journalism” seems defiant, Caijing’s reporting was cutting-edge journalism. Its well-researched reports included illegal trading practices in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, exposes of the government cover-up of the true extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic, the anomalous privatization of the huge, state-owned Luneng conglomerate, and falsification of the profits of Yinguangxia, one of the largest Chinese companies. These Caijing articles generated wide attention and led to the ousting of high public officials, the prosecution of corporate leaders, reforms in China’s stock market—and to HU SHULI being called “the most dangerous woman in China.” In November 2009, HU and her colleagues left Caijing and formed Caixin Media Group, a Beijing-based media organization with multimedia platforms including four periodicals, online news portals, books, TV/video programs, conferences, and mobile applications. With HU as editor-in-chief, Caixin has carried investigative reports on corporate fraud and government corruption, including the sale-for-adoption of children confiscated by family planning officials in Hunan province.

The significance of HU’s work, however, goes beyond investigative journalism. Through her skill and leadership, she has demonstrated that one can form a world-class, independent media organization in China, which combines commercial success and state-of-the-art technology with professional integrity and independence. As both a practicing journalist and the dean of Sun Yat-Sen University’s School of Communication and Design, HU has launched training programs for journalists and enhanced the professional and ethical standards of Chinese journalism. Admired by colleagues in China and abroad, she has changed China’s media landscape.

HU’s journalistic style is balanced and strongly-researched, does not stir up emotions, and keeps its eye on the issues rather than on personalities. Hers is a journalism that works within the system but preserves the critical distance that is journalism’s strength. HU compares her journalism to the action of the woodpecker, “forever hammering at a tree, trying not to knock it down but to make it grow straighter.” It is a nice analogy, but one too modest to describe the profound impact she has had on journalism in China.

In electing HU SHULI to receive the 2014 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her unrelenting commitment to truthful, relevant, and unassailable journalism, her fearless promotion of transparency and accountability in business and governance, and her leadership in blazing the way for more professional and independent-minded media practices in China.

It is an amazing honor to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. I’m both thrilled and humbled. In transitional countries like China, journalists like me face many obstacles to perform our jobs, but some special moments always make all our efforts worthwhile. This is definitely one of such moments.

Lingering in my mind are also those moments filled with ecstasy—filing an exclusive story and seeing readers rush to tell each other about it; those moments followed by change—might be a new regulation, or the failure of a massive business scheme, or even an industry overhaul—and those moments that make you feel you are shedding light to the unseen, lending a voice to the unheard, and illuminating a path where everyone is searching for direction. These moments never come easily. But they would come, as long as you try hard, and never give up.

Several weeks ago, such a moment grasped me. When the Chinese government finally announced the downfall of Zhou Yongkang, a former politburo standing committee member, Caixin immediately published a sixty-thousand-word, five-part piece detailing the Byzantium business and corruption web of Zhou.

A colleague at Caixin, who spent a whole year leading our investigation team to unearth that story, couldn’t help but cry out loud against those who say that journalists can’t do a good job in China.

Who said journalists can’t do a good job in China? That is what I’ve spent my whole professional life to disprove; that’s why I gathered together two hundred excellent journalists at Caixin, and that’s what keeps so many Chinese journalists to continue doing their job, despite the difficulties which stem from everywhere. It’s a blessing to be a journalist in today’s China, where there are endless stories to cover. And Chinese journalists can do a good job. My colleagues and I share this belief, and I’m very honored that you, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and our friends across Asia, share this too.

In recent decades, China’s relentless drive for economic growth has put the environment under great stress—poisoning China’s water and air, polluting cities and farmlands, and putting the lives of millions at risk. That China’s environmental problem has reached crisis levels is acknowledged by China’s central government, which has passed and strengthened a large number of environmental protection laws. But the success of this effort hinges on the strength of public participation in addressing what stands as one of China’s most serious challenges.

This is where WANG CANFA, a fifty-five-year-old environmental lawyer, has played an essential role. The son of peasants in Shandong province, WANG knew early on how the poor can be crippled by a sense of powerlessness. He worked long and hard to earn law degrees from Jilin University and Beijing University, and rose to become a leading environmental legal scholar and lawyer in China.

In 1998, as a professor at China University of Political Science and Law, he founded the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV), the first center of its kind in China to focus on providing free legal help to pollution victims. Manned by WANG as director, a deputy and a pool of pro bono volunteer lawyers, CLAPV has handled through its hotline more than thirteen thousand environmental complaints; filed more than 550 cases, including some class action suits involving as many as 1,721 plaintiffs; and scored victories against chemical, steel, mining, waste incineration and other plants. CLAPV’s legal victories have led to the suspension of some environmentally-destructive projects and secured compensation for victims.

But WANG’s work extends beyond litigation. Knowing that enlightened action is the key, and working constructively in what is a relatively new field, CLAPV has conducted training in environmental law for around a thousand lawyers, judges, and other stakeholders and built a network of practitioners of environmental law. Going even further, WANG and his colleagues have participated in the drafting and review of more than thirty environmental laws and regulations. His participation in legislation has promoted directly the establishment of some legal systems which is benefit of victims’ rights protection and punishing polluters. CLAPV has raised wide public awareness in environmental protection and guarding environmental right through publications, mobile consultancy services, and linkages with other organizations. Energetic and highly respected from both nongovernment and government, WANG is at the center of all these efforts.

In 2010, WANG took another bold step when he established a public interest law firm specializing in environmental law that provides pro bono services. Beijing Huanzhu Law Firm, with more than thirty lawyer-volunteers, has continued and bolstered CLAPV’s litigation efforts. To date, the firm has tenaciously pursued some two hundred litigation and non-litigation cases

For WANG and his colleagues, the difficulties are seemingly insurmountable— working with and through China’s web of laws and regulations, shifts in policy, and a weak justice system; negotiating the divide between central and local governments; confronting powerful corporate interests; and raising the funds to sustain their pro bono programs. But WANG is undeterred.

Working out of a tiny law office in a rundown Beijing apartment block, this diminutive, amiable, and unprepossessing man is “larger-than-life” for those who know of his work as leader of a broad network of environmental lawyers, academics, and community groups. WANG knows the way ahead is not easy, but he remains resolutely optimistic. “As long as we persist, the goal of establishing Chinese environmental rule of law will be achieved someday,” he asserts.

In electing WANG CANFA to receive the 2014 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his discerning and forceful leadership—through scholarly work, disciplined advocacy, and pro bono public interest litigation—in ensuring that the enlightened and competent practice of environmental law in China effectively protects the rights and lives of victims of environmental abuse, especially the poor and the powerless.

One month ago when I was visiting the UK, I was told that I have been selected as one of the winners of the 2014 Magsaysay Award. Professor Bob from the University of Exeter looked happier than me, and soon put my award-wining news as important news to his University’s front page. Peking University, which I once attended, also released the news on its webpage. Thousands of my colleagues and friends from NGOs and other agencies sent congratulations to me by various channels. I am very happy to share this great honor with so many friends. Here I would like to thank the Magsaysay Family and Board members of the Magsaysay Foundation for an objective evaluation of CLAPV’s and my work. I also like to thank all CLAPV’s volunteers and other organizations and agencies for their contribution and support.

Frankly, I never expected to receive this prestigious award. As an ordinary professor at the law school, I just conducted my teaching and research on environmental law, and at the same time organized volunteers who care deeply about environmental rule of law to provide legal aid to pollution victims. We just tried to turn legal provisions in the books into actions. These efforts put greater pressure on illegal polluters to force them to comply with existing environmental laws; and push government agencies to take stricter action against violators.

The Magsaysay Award is not only in recognition of CLAPV and my work, but also a confirmation of the effectiveness of the support from others in promoting environmental rule of law in China. It recognizes both the challenges we face and the progress we are making in addressing the plight of pollution victims and constructing an ecologically civilized society.

It is certainly encouraging that CLAPV’s efforts have achieved some success. This year, China adopted the new amendments to the Environmental Protection Law, considered the best environmental legislation so far, and includes some strict measures and new legal systems. We in CLAPV will continue striving to play a greater role in advancing environmental rights protection and rule of law in China.

We only have one earth and environmental harm knows no borders. To protect China’s environment is to protect the world’s environment. To help pollution victims in China is to protect our individual environmental rights as well. I hope organizations dedicated to environment protection and social justice continue providing support to China to solve its environmental problems. This will help China not only to play a constructive role in global environmental protection; it will also transform its economic growth to be green growth.

Over the past recent years, the Magsaysay Award has been given to several Chinese environmental activists; because of this, I personally believe that the Magsaysay Award has, to some extent, promoted environmental protection in China.

I wish to close with a reminder that I had mentioned earlier: We have only one earth, and environmental harm knows no boundaries. So I ask you: Please, let us all work together to protect our home planet, and realize our green dream!

Nowhere in the world is the challenge of environmental protection as dramatic as in China. In just three decades, China has risen to be the world’s third largest economy, a “boom” that has no clear parallel in history in its speed and scale. But China’s aggressive growth has exacted a terrible toll on the environment. It has polluted the country’s skies, decimated its forests, befouled its lakes and rivers, and created conditions that have resulted in disturbing levels of human mortality and community displacement caused by pollution and environmental disasters. 

Since 2002, when President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao assumed power, the environment has become a major national concern. New laws have been introduced; initiatives taken to reduce pollution and develop clean energy sources; and the state budget for environmental protection has been substantially increased. These state initiatives, however, are entangled in complex issues of enforcement, public participation, central-local government authority, and inter-ministry cooperation. 

In this context, two individuals, from two ends of the state bureaucracy, have done bold, constructive work in seizing and creating opportunities to address China?s environmental crisis. 

At the national level, PAN YUE has been a key figure in the Chinese government’s efforts in environmental protection. With a doctorate degree in history, fifty year-old PAN already had a rich and varied career as a government official when he became deputy-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration in 2003. Now vice-minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, he has proactively implemented such laws as the Environmental Assessment Law of 2003 and the Open Government Information Regulations of 2007. In doing so, he has taken on some of China’s biggest industries to disclose their environmental practices and to clean up their operations. 

In 2005, he boldly led the so-called “environmental protection storms,” during which seventy-six energy-generating projects, worth billions of dollars, were either suspended, shut down, or issued ultimatums for non-compliance with environmental regulations. Moreover, PAN has widened the space for civic participation by encouraging non-government organizations, citizen complaints, and public consultations to address the environmental impact of state and private development projects. 

PAN also pushed for the implementation of the controversial “Green GDP,” a national accounting system to determine China’s real national gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted to compensate for negative environmental effects. Introduced on a trial basis in 2004, its implementation was suspended after a few years. But in pushing for this and other measures, PAN set a standard for public action, declaring forthrightly: “China’s development has had a tumultuous history. Now is the time for a fair and sustainable model of growth.” 

At the local level, village chief FU QIPING has shown how great things can be done even in a village as small as Tengtou, eastern China’s Zhejiang province. Tengtou has a population of a mere eight hundred thirty citizens. A farmer who has worked as a village official since 1980 and as village chief since 1997, FU used the opportunities of China’s decentralized system to turn Tengtou into one of China’s most prosperous villages. 

Three decades ago, Tengtou was impoverished, flood-prone, and resource-poor. Today, it is known internationally as a “miracle village.” Collectively organized as an economic enterprise, it has built a base in agriculture and ecotourism, operates business companies, and hosts some sixty investors engaged in textile, food processing, and other activities. Remarkably, all these came hand-in-hand with a commitment to environmental protection. 

In 1993, Tengtou set up China’s first-ever village-level environmental protection committee that has, among others, rejected over fifty companies wanting to set up shop in Tengtou because they failed to meet environmental standards. The village practices environment-friendly agriculture, invests in renewable energy, boasts of a wastewater treatment system and solar-powered streetlights, and carries out environment-related science-and-education projects. All these have been made possible by the solidarity of the village and, in large part, by the innovative leadership of sixty-two-year-old FU QIPING, who has devoted his life to creating a village both environmentally healthy and economically secure. “This is my ideal,” he says, “and it is in pursuing it that I can do my country, party and other villagers proud.” 

In electing PAN YUE andFU QIPING to receive the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes their exemplary vision and zeal as public servants at two levels of the state bureaucracy, in advocating the inseparability of development and the environment in uplifting the lives of the Chinese people. The board recognizes PAN YUE for his bold pursuit of a national environmental program, insisting on state and private accountability, encouraging state-citizen dialogue, and raising the environment as an issue of urgent national concern; likewise, the board recognizes FU QIPING for his enterprising leadership and undeniable success in demonstrating how village-level economic development can be achieved without damage to the environment.

The Honorable Benigno S. Aquino III, Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and friends. Today, I am honored to stand before you to accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

I will highly value this award given to me, and I sincerely thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. If I were only receiving this award because of what I have done for my village, I would feel embarrassed to accept it. The success of Tengtou is due to the joint efforts of the officers, the villagers and the government departments. So this award does not only belong to me but to all the people who contributed to the success of our village. 

Thirty years ago, I became the head of Tengtou village. It was hard to be the leader of a village that faced problems of poverty and underdevelopment, to have such huge responsibilities with a low salary. Even with these problems, I could not let go of my responsibilities because of my love and devotion to our village. I am willing to give up everything to help Tengtou’s villagers live an ideal life. 

Tengtou, though a small village, strove to create a miracle, which fully shows that Chinese peasants are capable of changing their destiny. We hope to share our experience with others, so that more peasants in China and elsewhere can live a better life. We also wish to draw more knowledge and gain experience to further develop our village. 

My favorite hobby is to get up every morning and walk around the village. Whenever I pass by orderly and beautiful houses while walking through the clean and green streets, I feel deeply the changes that have taken place in our village. I always think about the dramatic transformation that has happened in Tengtou village, and it fills me with emotion. 

I am glad that I was involved in this great undertaking, and at the same time thankful that Tengtou’s villagers have given me a chance like this. We have higher goals to achieve; therefore I will continuously exert great efforts for the betterment of our village. This award encourages me to work harder, and to serve the village even more. Thank you very much!

Water pollution is one of the biggest environmental challenges facing the government and people of China. Massive industrialization has left 70 percent of China’s rivers gravely contaminated, threatening the health and livelihood of hundreds of millions of its people. 

A stark example is Huai River, China’s third largest, that runs a thousand kilometers through four provinces and forms a major agricultural basin which is home to over 150 million people. Industries have dumped millions of tons of waste and sewage into Huai, transforming it into China’s most polluted river. Pollution’s threat to people’s health is dramatized in the emergence of so-called “cancer villages”—poor riverine communities where there is an extraordinarily high incidence of tumors and cancers associated with contaminated water.

The Huai River is dying, and so are people living along its most toxic stretches. In 1994, China’s government responded to this problem with a multi-billion, basin-wide pollution control project. The project’s impact, however, proved inadequate.

One of the most seriously threatened areas along the Huai River is Henan province, and in Henan the county of Shenqiu has the largest cluster of “cancer villages” in China. In 1987, Huo Daishan, a newspaper photographer from Shenqiu, was so shocked by the river’s blackened water, poisonous fumes, and dead fish that he started to document the river’s pollution. Armed with a cheap camera, pen and notebook, he began a one-man campaign to publicize the issue, taking it up as a full-time mission in 1998, and organizing a group called “Guardians of the Huai River” in 2000. The following year, he staged his first exhibit along a street in his village by stringing together on a clothesline photographs of the river. With the help of his wife and two sons, he worked out of his family’s small apartment in Shenqiu, with very meager resources and little outside assistance. But he threw himself into his mission with such determination, he eventually succeeded in calling wide public attention to the tragedy of Huai.

Through fifteen thousand images, Huo has laboriously documented Huai River’s pollution in over twenty cities and counties across Henan. He has mounted seventy exhibitions in cities, universities, and villages; written letters exposing the illegal activities of local officials and factory owners; and championed the cause of the river and its people in media and conferences. His images of waters wreathed with noxious foam and village children wearing gas masks stirred wide public debate. Still, Huo went beyond taking pictures: he engaged in research and documentation; organized site visits for students and concerned groups; and recruited and trained hundreds of volunteer “guardians” who now work in teams to regularly monitor the river and conduct water-testing along the river communities.

Harassed by local officials and factory owners, he did not relent in his campaign. By dint of his sincerity and persistence, Huo has since succeeded in building cooperative relations with local authorities and industries. A major polluter in the area, and one of China’s biggest MSG manufacturers, is now working collaboratively with Huo in implementing pollution-control measures. Moving forward, Huo has taken other steps to address the urgent needs of affected villagers: linking up with government and private institutions, he has installed deepwater wells and low-cost water filtration systems in local communities; hundreds of cancer patients have also been provided muchneeded medicines.

Efforts by government and citizens have resulted in some improvement in the condition of the Huai. But the problem of pollution remains critical. When Huo started out in his crusade, he dreamed, he said, of “returning the river to its pristine condition when I was still a child.” In his lifetime, this may remain only a dream. But in passionately pursuing this dream, fifty-six-yearold Huo has already shown what great things can be done by a single, ordinary citizen to protect a river and its people.

In electing Huo Daishan to receive the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his selfless and unrelenting efforts, despite formidable odds, to save China’s great river Huai and the numerous communities who draw life from it.

I feel greatly honored to be elected as one of those to receive the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award. First of all, I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. Thank you for paying great attention to me since a long time ago. It is because of your great work that I stand on this stage today.

From the bottom of my heart, I feel that this award belongs to all the volunteers of the Huai River Guardians and the villagers living along the Huai. Because at each time that I was in peril, it was they who stood firmly with me and devoted all they had to keep our endeavors alive. It was they who offered me their homes in the villages to protect me and keep me safe. I have no doubt that without these people, I could not have held on up to this day, and be able to talk to you on this great occasion.

I also want to thank my wife Dong Sulin and my children. For more than ten years, they have shared my pressures and responsibilities. Even though they are not getting any pay because they are merely volunteers, my two sons — Min Hao and Min Jie have had no reluctance to become the second generation of Huai River’s guardians.

Last but not least, I cannot forget the support I got from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection throughout these years. I thank them for treating me as a pair of eyes to watch over Huai River. They allowed me to directly communicate with them. I reported to them so many times while standing right on the spot where the Huai River’s pollution was breaking out.

I come from a county in Henan Province which lies on the banks of the Huai River. I was raised on the waters of the Huai. I love my hometown so deeply. Today, I accept this award as an honor, and as a responsibility. I am going to spend the prize money which the award gives me for building more water purifying systems in the villages along the Huai. I hope by doing so, the farmers in these villages, who are the innocent victims of pollution, will understand our Magsaysay Award from a much closer distance, and feel its impact in their own lives.

Nowhere in the world is the challenge of environmental protection as dramatic as in China. In just three decades, China has risen to be the world’s third largest economy, a “boom” that has no clear parallel in history in its speed and scale. But China’s aggressive growth has exacted a terrible toll on the environment. It has polluted the country’s skies, decimated its forests, befouled its lakes and rivers, and created conditions that have resulted in disturbing levels of human mortality and community displacement caused by pollution and environmental disasters. 

Since 2002, when President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao assumed power, the environment has become a major national concern. New laws have been introduced; initiatives taken to reduce pollution and develop clean energy sources; and the state budget for environmental protection has been substantially increased. These state initiatives, however, are entangled in complex issues of enforcement, public participation, central-local government authority, and inter-ministry cooperation. 

In this context, two individuals, from two ends of the state bureaucracy, have done bold, constructive work in seizing and creating opportunities to address China?s environmental crisis. 

At the national level, PAN YUE has been a key figure in the Chinese government’s efforts in environmental protection. With a doctorate degree in history, fifty year-old PAN already had a rich and varied career as a government official when he became deputy-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration in 2003. Now vice-minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, he has proactively implemented such laws as the Environmental Assessment Law of 2003 and the Open Government Information Regulations of 2007. In doing so, he has taken on some of China’s biggest industries to disclose their environmental practices and to clean up their operations. 

In 2005, he boldly led the so-called “environmental protection storms,” during which seventy-six energy-generating projects, worth billions of dollars, were either suspended, shut down, or issued ultimatums for non-compliance with environmental regulations. Moreover, PAN has widened the space for civic participation by encouraging non-government organizations, citizen complaints, and public consultations to address the environmental impact of state and private development projects. 

PAN also pushed for the implementation of the controversial “Green GDP,” a national accounting system to determine China’s real national gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted to compensate for negative environmental effects. Introduced on a trial basis in 2004, its implementation was suspended after a few years. But in pushing for this and other measures, PAN set a standard for public action, declaring forthrightly: “China’s development has had a tumultuous history. Now is the time for a fair and sustainable model of growth.” 

At the local level, village chief FU QIPING has shown how great things can be done even in a village as small as Tengtou, eastern China’s Zhejiang province. Tengtou has a population of a mere eight hundred thirty citizens. A farmer who has worked as a village official since 1980 and as village chief since 1997, FU used the opportunities of China’s decentralized system to turn Tengtou into one of China’s most prosperous villages. 

Three decades ago, Tengtou was impoverished, flood-prone, and resource-poor. Today, it is known internationally as a “miracle village.” Collectively organized as an economic enterprise, it has built a base in agriculture and ecotourism, operates business companies, and hosts some sixty investors engaged in textile, food processing, and other activities. Remarkably, all these came hand-in-hand with a commitment to environmental protection. 

In 1993, Tengtou set up China’s first-ever village-level environmental protection committee that has, among others, rejected over fifty companies wanting to set up shop in Tengtou because they failed to meet environmental standards. The village practices environment-friendly agriculture, invests in renewable energy, boasts of a wastewater treatment system and solar-powered streetlights, and carries out environment-related science-and-education projects. All these have been made possible by the solidarity of the village and, in large part, by the innovative leadership of sixty-two-year-old FU QIPING, who has devoted his life to creating a village both environmentally healthy and economically secure. “This is my ideal,” he says, “and it is in pursuing it that I can do my country, party and other villagers proud.” 

In electing PAN YUE andFU QIPING to receive the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes their exemplary vision and zeal as public servants at two levels of the state bureaucracy, in advocating the inseparability of development and the environment in uplifting the lives of the Chinese people. The board recognizes PAN YUE for his bold pursuit of a national environmental program, insisting on state and private accountability, encouraging state-citizen dialogue, and raising the environment as an issue of urgent national concern; likewise, the board recognizes FU QIPING for his enterprising leadership and undeniable success in demonstrating how village-level economic development can be achieved without damage to the environment.

Water is now a major issue in China, where majority of the rivers and lakes are polluted, and four hundred of its six hundred cities are facing water shortages. The problem has serious repercussions for health, food security, biodiversity, and economic growth. With rapid industrialization and urbanization, the problem has become even more critical. Forty-one year-old MA JUN is using creative and constructive ways to address the pollution crisis. 

MA joined the Beijing bureau of South China Morning Post after finishing his university studies in English and journalism. As he traveled the country and wrote reports, he saw how China’s economic boom was taking a destructive toll on the environment. In 1999, he published his book China’s Water Crisis, which has been hailed as China’s “first great environmental call to arms.” In it, MA warned: “Sixty percent of our rivers are polluted, the proliferation of dams destroys ecosystems, our air quality is deplorable. This is simply unbearable.” 

After leaving South China Morning Post, he worked as an environmental consultant, then went to Yale University and did comparative research on environmental governance in the US and China. His experiences as a journalist and scholar deepened his understanding of the environmental issues and how to deal with them in China’s unique economic and political context. He concluded that active, meaningful “public participation is the key to dealing with [China’s] environmental problems” and that access to information is the precondition for such public participation. 

Thus, in 2006, he established the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and launched the China Water Pollution Map, the first public database of water pollution information in China. The database is a facility accessible in and outside China, using official data from various government agencies in charge of water resources and environment protection. Through the digital map, with the click of a button, people can survey the water quality in specific rivers and lakes all over the country, monitor pollution discharges, and find out which companies discharge pollution exceeding statutory levels. In this strategy of “name and shame,” thirty-five thousand records of violations by corporations have been posted in the map to date. 

MA expanded his work in 2007 with the China Air Pollution Map. Providing public access to air quality data, it has already named over ten thousand companies violating emission standards. Together with the water pollution database, this map has dramatically increased public awareness of the state of China’s environmental pollution. 

But MA and his organization do not just “name and shame”; they also proactively help companies resolve their pollution management problems. Polluters are removed from the offenders’ list after professional, third-party audits have shown that they have made changes to improve their company’s pollution control. To complement its database program, IPE, together with twenty other NGOs, has organized the Green Choice Alliance, which works on supply chain management systems by getting corporations to openly commit not to use polluters as suppliers of products or services. Leading multinationals like General Electric, Wal-Mart, and Nike which have made such a commitment are using the IPE database regularly to track the performance of their suppliers in China. 

It is MA’s fervent belief that public knowledge exerts pressure on government and corporations to act. Taking advantage of the government’s greater openness to public participation in environmental protection, he has introduced initiatives that are both constructive and realistic. For this reason, his work is exerting a unique influence on environmental practices in China. MA says that the next twenty years is a critical period for his country. “We need to make sure that this generation of Chinese has the best environmental health standards. We need to keep the best of our natural and cultural heritage, and hand it over to the next generation.”

In electing MA JUN to receive the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his harnessing the technology and power of information to address China’s water crisis, and mobilizing pragmatic, multisectoral and collaborative efforts to ensure sustainable benefits for China’s environment and society.

It is a great honor for me to be elected to receive the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Award. I take this Award as a recognition of the multi-stakeholder efforts made in China to reduce pollution and achieve sustainable development. 

Like many Asian countries that are going through industrialization and urbanization, China is facing a multiple set of environmental challenges including water and air pollution, exhaustion of resources and degradation of the ecosystem, as well as climate change. These have posed a severe threat to the health of our people, and to the sustainability of our country. 

Increasingly, people have come to realize that environmental damage in such a magnitude could only be tackled through broad public involvement. But people cannot meaningfully participate in governance without access to information. Besides, economic globalization means that the damage to the local environment and communities caused by industrial pollution may occur in a place thousands of miles away from those who consume the cheap products made in developing countries. 

To promote environmental transparency in our country, and to contribute to global-level environmental monitoring, we at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs built a national water and air pollution database, taking advantage of the expanding penetration of the Internet and other IT technology. When people gain access to environmental quality data and factory-based violation records, large numbers of corporations are exposed to public scrutiny, and an increasing number of them start to change their behavior. 

Today the fast growth of the world’s population, and the even faster expansion of the scale of consumption and manufacturing, quickly consume the world’s limited resources and put mounting pressure on its fragile ecosystem. Meanwhile, a rising public awareness, evolving government policy, and an emerging sense of corporate responsibility have set the stage for participatory environmental governance. We trust that the green choice made by an informed public will provide the ultimate driving force for sustainable development. 

We are only at the beginning of a long journey towards sustainability. 

I am grateful to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for such a major acknowledgment to our work. It will go a long way in encouraging us and others to carry on the prolonged endeavor.

China boasts of a staggering eighty-five thousand dams throughout the country, or 46 percent of all such structures in the world. Clearly, hydropower is a key requirement for China?s economic development. Yet dams have led as well to the displacement of over fifteen million Chinese and incalculable damage to the natural environment. A leading figure in the debate on dams and their social impact is YU XIAOGANG. 

YU fell in love with nature early on, having been raised in Yunnan, a province of amazing beauty and home to three of the largest rivers in the world: Nu, Yangtze, and Mekong. His interest in the environment was cultivated during a stint in the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, and was further deepened when he attended the Asian Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree in watershed management. 

His graduate research on the social impact of China’s Manwan hydroelectric project documented its negative impact on local communities. Dissemination of his findings stirred controversy and led then Premier Zhu Rongji to order the conduct of an investigation; additionally, the Yunnan government was instructed to release funds to mitigate the dam’s adverse effects. 

In 2002, YU established the nonprofit organization Green Watershed, which developed an integrated watershed management program in the Lashi Lake area, in Yunnan. Lashi was seriously affected by a dam project that had diverted 40 percent of the lake’s water, flooded farmlands, and devastated the livelihood of people in the dammed area. Using participatory approaches, Green Watershed helped the affected communities organize a multisectoral Watershed Management Committee, and mobilized village associations for irrigation, fishery, and other purposes. The communities undertook other activities as well, including microcredit and training in watershed forest protection and biodiversity conservation. 

These initiatives proved so successful that new, ecologically-friendly, and profitable enterprises flourished in the area. The first of its kind in China, the Lashi project became a model for participatory watershed management, and was cited by government as one of the top ten cases of sustainable development in the country. The Lashi project became the springboard for YU’s advocacy in other dam sites. Green Watershed conducted research and forums and used mass media to promote the cause of people’s participation in the planning and development of dams. 

When the local government announced plans to build thirteen new dams on the Nu River, plans that threatened to displace fifty thousand people and negatively impact a UNESCO-designated “World Heritage” nature site, Green Watershed and other environmental NGOs mounted a public debate. The controversy occasioned Premier Wen Jiabao’s decision to put the planned dams on hold, requiring a more scientific study. 

Still, it has been an uphill challenge. YU has met with opposition and even harassment in the course of his work, including a ban on travel outside the country. His position, however, is not simply adversarial. In 2008, he initiated Green Banking, a network of eight major environmental NGOs that gives the “Green Banking Innovation Award” to banks and financial institutions that have contributed to environmental protection in their financing and corporate practices. 

YU recognizes that large-scale infrastructure projects like dams will go on. He is not against dams per se; however, he and his fellow environmentalists will persist in showing that local communities and ecosystems need not be sacrificed in the process of development. Thus, he advocates that a true social impact assessment, in which the people themselves are actively involved, should be a precondition in all dam building programs. For YU, their initial successes “are only the first steps in the Long March. To realize true sustainable development and build a harmonious society throughout China, we need the full participation of all Chinese citizens.” 

In electing YU XIAOGANG to receive the 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his fusing social science knowledge with a deep sense of social justice, in assisting dam-affected communities in China to shape the development projects that impact their natural environment and their lives.

It is a great honor for me to be elected as 2009 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee. I would like to thank the Board of Trustees and the people of the Philippines. 

I come from southwest China, home to Lijiang, a small ancient city which is both a World Cultural Heritage Site and World Natural Heritage Site. Lijiang also has the Internationally Important Wetlands of Lashi Lake and the Naxi minority group who use pictographs to recount the stories of nature and humankind. 

The NGO Green Watershed was originally founded in this region in 2002 to improve local environmental protection. But now half of the organization’s time is spent on community disaster relief programs and disaster prevention education. Why has this change occurred? To explain this refocusing of objectives I will borrow from the Naxi story of nature and humankind. This story was written in religious text and is central to Naxi culture. 

In ancient times humankind and nature were two brothers, and the brothers divided and reigned over different parts of the earth. Big Brother oversaw the forests, lakes, wildlife, and the weather. Little Brother looked over the fields, crops, livestock, and the happiness of humankind. The two brothers established an agreement of mutual non-aggression and they existed harmoniously. Hundreds of years passed, the weather was good for growing crops, people were well fed and well clothed, and humankind prospered. However, over time Little Brother’s human descendants forgot the original agreement and began to attack Big Brother’s natural world, destroying pristine lands, causing immense deforestation, damming once-free rivers, and rapidly killing off wildlife. Big Brother called upon the natural world to bring floods, storms, droughts, swarms of insects, and plagues. Little Brother’s humankind lost their happiness and prosperity under the punishment of Big Brother. In the end, Little Brother realized his errors and overcame the greed and destruction, once again reuniting with Big Brother and existing in harmony. 

This story comes out of an old agricultural society, and may seem rather distant. However, the two brothers are currently in a time of industrialization, and Little Brother’s vision does not consider the forests, lakes, wildlife, or natural ecosystems. Little Brother’s eyes only have visions of resources and methods that he can use to accumulate personal wealth, thus plundering and polluting the environment at an ever growing intensity. Big Brother may react with opposition to this behavior, bringing more serious and intense natural disasters. China has already become the world’s third highest country suffering from natural disasters. 

This confirms Green Watershed’s investment in community-based disaster management. Last year alone, we provided training for over one hundred NGOs and over sixty communities. In the future we will place more resources and efforts to promote community disaster management capacities. 

Naxi culture has given us this inspiration: to respect and love nature, and to exercise restraint over greed and vanity. Otherwise, our pride in our GDP will change into GDD, Gross Domestic Disaster. 

What I am doing is only “a drop in the bigger water.” I believe the effort will someday become as big as the Pacific Ocean. I highly appreciate that the Board of Trustees has given me this honor. I am very glad to accept it and will continue my efforts to contribute to human society. Thank you.

In China today, a transformation of dazzling speed and complexity is reshaping society and calling forth new leaders. CHUNG TO and CHEN GUANGCHENG are two of these. Each one in his own way, and on his own initiative, has stepped forward to address an urgent contemporary need. Where others have been slow to act, they have acted. 

CHEN GUANGCHENG was born in a tiny village in Shandong Province. Blinded by a fever when he was an infant, he was denied schooling for most of his youth. Instead, he soaked in knowledge by listening to the radio and absorbing the classic Chinese stories his father read to him. At seventeen, he entered a school for the blind and by age thirty he had completed a university course in massage and acupuncture therapy. By this time, CHEN’s independent spirit had been thoroughly aroused. 

When local officials in 1996 refused to honor a law exempting disabled persons from the annual agricultural tax — thus imposing an illicit burden on his own parents — CHEN took his grievance all the way to central authorities in Beijing, and won! Local people with similar grievances began to seek his advice. By diligently studying law books read to him by others, he became a “barefoot lawyer” and helped his neighbors to register their complaints effectively and file civil cases in the local courts. 

In 1998, CHEN led farmers in Yinan County in protest against a river-polluting paper factory and persuaded an international donor to fund a deep well as an alternative to the filthy river water. He launched a project to advance the legal rights of the disabled and filed a case against a public transportation company in Beijing for refusing to honor the law providing free rides to the blind. This created an unwelcome national stir. 

Indeed, by this time, CHEN’s activism had drawn the irate attention of the local authorities. He was investigated and harassed. In 2003, anonymous wall posters in Linyi City, where he lived, called upon people to break his legs. 

CHEN was thus already a noted thorn in the side of Yinan County officials in 2004 when they launched a ruthless campaign to bring the county within government population-control quotas?by coercing mothers-to-be into late-term abortions and thousands of other women into involuntary sterilization. All of this was in violation of an existing law requiring informed consent. The outcry soon reached CHEN, who meticulously documented the abuses and worked with the victims and lawyers to organize a class-action suit against the responsible officials –the first case of its kind in China and also the first concerted domestic challenge to the use of violence in China’s population policy. The suit failed, but led to an investigation by the State Family Planning Commission and a tacit admission of excesses. Meanwhile, CHEN took the issue to the press and diplomatic corps and onto the Internet, leading to global exposure. 

For this, he paid a heavy price. Back in Linyi, CHEN’s cell phone was jammed, his computer seized; he and his wife and friends were repeatedly beaten. He was confined to his house, abducted and held secretly for three months, and then finally charged with disturbing public order in connection with a demonstration on his behalf. In a trial behind closed doors to which his own lawyers were not admitted, he was convicted and is now serving a prison term of four years and three months. 

CHEN’s hope is in the rule of law. He is energizing the grass roots and, with many others, challenging Chinese local authorities to obey the laws of the state. But this will not happen until citizens learn to act, he says. “People should protect their rights themselves.?”

In electing CHEN GUANGCHENG to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his irrepressible passion for justice in leading ordinary Chinese citizens to assert their legitimate rights under the law.

(Mr. Chen Guangcheng was to be represented by his wife at the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Presentation Ceremonies today. She has since been unable to travel to Manila. Following is her response:)

Respected Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s Board of Trustees, Dear Friends:

Hello everyone!

I am Yuan Weijing, the wife of the blind human rights defender Chen Guangcheng, and I want to express my great gratitude to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for honoring my husband with the “Emergent Leadership Award.”

As of this moment, Guangcheng is incarcerated in Linyi prison in China’s Shandong Province. There, no special care is given to visually impaired inmates. The authorities have further deprived him of the means to read and write, and to listen to the radio, and are denying him other basic rights. His fellow prisoners were told that they were not allowed to have conversations with him. Being isolated in this way, I can imagine how happy, comforted and encouraged Guangcheng will feel to know that he has won this award.

Guangcheng believes in the rule of law. He has faith in the law and has faith in the law and justice. He has always worked with dedication on making the law in the books also respected in practice in China. Being visually impaired and a peasant as well, he has been particularly concerned about the basic rights of the disabled and the rural population. Because Guangcheng engaged in helping peasants to safeguard their rights, he became the target of a retaliatory strike by some corrupt government officials. Naturally, I was very worried about his safety and at that time I even urged him to stop with this work, in order to avoid danger. Guangcheng said: “How many people are complaining about injustice in society? Yet how many people think about what they have done to correct such injustice? Every little progress in society is the result of someone driving that effort. If we work hard, it is possible to achieve change; if not, it will be impossible.”

At present, he is serving a 4 years and 3 months prison sentence, the result of a conviction based on trumped-up charges and a flawed trial process. I was myself unlawfully kept under house arrest for two years by the authorities of Linyi in Shandong Province. Having fled from there to Beijing, I still face the danger of being kidnapped and taken back anytime. Prior to leaving, I went to prison to visit Guangcheng. He comforted his family and friends by assuring us that we need not feel sorry for him, and that we should think of him as just having left town for a while on a human rights mission. While in prison, he still uses the law to safeguard his and the other prisoners’ rights.

I am very happy that Guangcheng’s efforts have received recognition and encouragement from the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and from other like-minded friends. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to the lawyers and human rights defenders who risked their lives in providing legal assistance; to friends who still went to Linyi to show solidarity and support after having been stripped of their shirts and beaten by the police, and even having been subjected to house arrest; to the good and upright villagers who were kidnapped, tortured to extract statements supporting the trumped-up charges against my husband, and even themselves sentenced, all on account of Guangcheng’s case; to the friends in the media who reported the truth to help Guangcheng; and to the friends who are working hard toward Guangcheng’s release from detention, so he can regain his freedom.

I regret that I could not be present at this awarding ceremony to personally congratulate the six other awardees. I am proud of my husband and of all of you.

I and my children pray for Guangcheng’s early return home!

YUAN WEIJING
Beijing, 2 August 2007

In China today, a transformation of dazzling speed and complexity is reshaping society and calling forth new leaders. CHUNG TO and CHEN GUANGCHENG are two of these. Each one in his own way, and on his own initiative, has stepped forward to address an urgent contemporary need. Where others have been slow to act, they have acted. 

CHUNG TO was born in Hong Kong but migrated with his family to the United States when he was fifteen. He attended Columbia University, earned a master’s degree at Harvard, and then plunged into a career in banking. In 1995, success led him back to Hong Kong as a senior bank executive. 

By this time, CHUNG TO was already sensitized to the AIDS crisis through the death of a favorite teacher and of many friends. In Hong Kong, he was alarmed to find the male homosexual community largely ignorant of the threat. Gay men accounted for a third of the city’s HIV-AIDS cases, yet unprotected sex was commonplace. 

CHUNG TO reacted by creating the Chi Heng Foundation (CHF) in 1998, to arm gay men with a means of protecting themselves. Beginning in Hong Kong but later expanding into the mainland, he enlisted the help of pimps and brothel owners and hundreds of volunteers to distribute condoms and safe-sex kits in gay bars and clubs. He set up a help line with frank, factual information about HIV-AIDS and offered workshops and personal counseling, legal advice, and links to doctors. And he exploited the rising popularity of the Internet to reach the millions of gay Chinese men who use it. By 2006, CHUNG TO had established CHF branches in ten Chinese cities. Taking note, the United Nations named his direct, management-savvy approach one of its “best practice” models for China. 

In 2001, an encounter with AIDS victims in Henan Province led CHUNG TO in a different direction. In Henan, the AIDS epidemic was caused not by sexual contact but by the egregiously careless practices of blood buyers. Here, he saw villages where half of the adults had either died of AIDS or were HIV-positive. “I have never seen so much hardship and suffering concentrated in one small village,” he says. He was especially moved by the plight of children orphaned by AIDS. Their grim lives and futures stirred him to launch the AIDS Orphans Project in 2002. He left his job at the bank to devote himself full-time to China’s AIDS crisis. “I figured that the world could do with one less banker,” he says. “But these children, they cannot wait.”

Pondering how to help the children, CHUNG TO concluded that education was the key. In its target areas, his AIDS Orphans Project provides every child who has an AIDS-infected parent with school fees and expenses through university or vocational school. To avoid reinforcing the AIDS stigma and its social isolation, CHUNG TO spurns orphanages and foster homes and insists that AIDS-impacted children attend normal village schools and live with relatives. His foundation also provides the children self-affirming counseling through art and writing therapy, summer camps, and home visits by CHF volunteers-including CHUNG TO himself. CHUNG TO’s orphans project began with 127 students in a single village. Today, four thousand children of AIDS in five provinces are benefiting. 

CHUNG TO works cooperatively with the Chinese authorities and has found allies in international NGOs and foundations. Still, raising funds is a constant concern. CHF has a “six-step fund-raising strategy” and CHUNG TO himself has also recently returned to the business world-another strategy for sustainability. As CHF?s chairperson, he hopes to multiply the foundation’s impact with a new “business model.” What began as a “family run” enterprise, he says, will become “a multi-branch franchise.”

In electing CHUNG TO to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his proactive and compassionate response to AIDS in China and to the needs of its most vulnerable victims.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow Awardees and dear friends. 

A seven-year-old girl I know named Fang Fang asked her dying mother, “Mom, why don’t you sell me? If you sold me, you would have money to buy medicine.” What she did not know was that both her parents were dying of AIDS from selling their blood. They died recently, leaving Fang Fang and her younger sister behind. Her sister has since been diagnosed HIV-positive. Having lost both parents to AIDS, Fang Fang will soon lose her only sibling to the virus, becoming the only survivor in her family. 

According to the China News Agency, there are 76,000 AIDS orphans like Fang Fang on the mainland, and the number will increase to 260,000 by 2010. UNICEF’s estimates are higher: that there are half a million children in China today who have been orphaned by the disease, are HIV-positive or are living in households with at least one HIV-positive parent. 

Due to unsanitary collection practices in the 1990s, many poor peasants contracted HIV while selling blood to earn extra income. In some villages today, more than 40 percent of adults have either died of AIDS or are HIV-positive. Tens of thousands of orphans have been left behind. Most do not have HIV themselves. If we do not help them now, they will grow up uneducated and vulnerable, becoming a large force for social instability for decades to come. 

Having watched in horror the destruction of the middle generation, I started a programme to help AIDS-impacted children by sponsoring their education and providing psycho-social support and vocational training. The Chi Heng Foundation does not build orphanages, and we do not operate foster care. Instead we empower local communities so that children can grow up with their grandparents and relatives. We help them to go back to school with children not affected by AIDS. We also try to cut out middlemen by paying school fees directly to schools and to the students we serve. Taking a pragmatic, non-confrontational approach, we have grown to become the largest non-government effort focused on helping youngsters affected by AIDS in China, serving more than 4,000 children. 

Since AIDS emerged twenty-five years ago, it has killed more than twenty million people worldwide. Another forty-five million people are living with HIV. While most casualties have been in sub-Saharan Africa, many experts predict Asia will be next. You may think Asia still has a long time to respond. However, from an epidemiological perspective, once we have passed a threshold, the virus will spread rapidly. We do not have time to be complacent. Even a moderate 3 percent infection rate in just two Asian countries, China and India, could translate into seventy million new infections, resulting in unbearable costs in medical care and social instability-and millions of orphans. 

On learning of the disastrous impact of AIDS in Africa, many people in the developed world said, “Gee, I wish I had known. We could have done something.” In the case of Asia, we have no excuse for saying such a thing-because we do know AIDS is coming. We also have a rapidly closing window of opportunity to prevent more from being infected and do something about children affected by the virus. Ten years from now, would we rather say to each other “Gee, I wish I had done something,” or “Gee, I am proud that I have done something?” 

I would like to thank my good friend and mentor, Dr. Gao Yao Jie, who came all the way from China to show her support. Her integrity, her courage to speak the truth and her compassion to help AIDS-impacted people are my inspiration, motivating me to go on. 

Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to the Ramon Magsaysay Award selection committee for giving me this prestigious award, which is not only a recognition of our work, but also a statement of the importance of AIDS.

Over the centuries, as primeval nature yielded to a vast human habitat in China, the Chinese came to see themselves not as creatures of nature but as its masters. Environmentalist TANG XIYANG believes that this mentality lies behind the predatory assault on China’s environment today. In China, he says, under the pressure of rapid industrialization and the material yearnings of 1.4 billion people, “nature has been badly damaged.” Healing it is his passion. 

Born in 1930, TANG XIYANG emerged from a youth amid war and revolution as a hopeful believer in the new China. He attended Beijing Normal University in the heady inaugural years of the People’s Republic and, in 1952, joined The Beijing Daily as a reporter. In 1957, however, he was denounced as a Rightist. During the next twenty years, he was made to toil in a rock quarry, sweep the streets, and write confession after confession. In the Cultural Revolution, his wife was murdered by raging teenagers, and TANG himself was torn from his two young daughters to labor in the countryside. There, paradoxically, he found himself “surrounded by flowing waters, . . . singing birds, and rustling leaves.” His despair lifted and, he says, “Nature saved me.” 

Exonerated in 1980, TANG became editor of Great Nature Magazine and began exploring China’s nature reserves. In Yunnan, he met fellow nature-lover Marcia Bliss Marks, an American who became his wife and partner. As they explored China together, TANG wrote prolifically about the richness and variety of China’s wildlife and animal habitats. Later, the pair toured fifty national parks and wildlife refuges in Europe, North America, and Asia. TANG’s book about their trip, A Green World Tour, introduced its readers to nature preservation as a global movement and became the bible for China’s young environmentalists. TANG challenged them to become “great travelers, explorers, scientists, and vanguards for nature conservation.” 

In 1996, the year Marcia died, TANG invited 21 university students to spend their summer holidays in Yunnan, where local officials planned to harvest logs on a one hundred-square-mile swath of old-growth forest, the unique habitat of the golden monkey. The research and publicity arising from TANG’s Green Camp helped pressure the government to change course. Buoyed by this success, TANG began organizing Green Camps every year, dispatching a fresh team of students to a different site each summer from Tibet’s primeval forests to the beaches of Hainan. Graduates of TANG’s Green Camps have now organized spin-off camps all over China and can be found today among the staff members of China’s environmental NGOs. Meanwhile, TANG himself lectures tirelessly throughout the mainland-delivering 130 lectures in 17 cities in 2005 alone. 

He tells audiences that nature follows its own law. If the natural law is violated, “nature will seek revenge.” This is why preserving the habitats of brown-eared pheasants and redcrowned cranes and golden monkeys is inescapably linked to preserving a healthy habitat for humans. 

Society also follows certain laws, he says. China has paid a heavy price for its errant legacy of “feudalism, autocracy, and violence.” TANG has concluded that democracy is better. Indeed, without democracy, he says, “there can be no everlasting green hills and clear waters.” 

Finally, TANG stresses that preserving nature is not China’s problem alone. It requires global cooperation. “China needs to know the world,” he says, “and the world needs to know China.” 

TANG’s friends marvel at his workload. At seventy-seven, he remains passionately engaged. Still, although he never lets up, he has learned to get to the point quickly. His latest book, summarizing his views, is called Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. 

In electing TANG XIYANG to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his guiding China to meet its mounting environmental crisis by heeding the lessons of its global neighbors and the timeless wisdom of nature itself.

On the 1st of August, while the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation announced that I am the awardee for Peace and International Understanding, I was in the beautiful Changbai Mountain Reserve with some members of the Green Camp for College Students. Green Camp was launched in 1996 by Marcia B. Marks, my deceased wife, and me. This is our twelfth year. Forty students from thirty-six universities as well as four teachers from Taiwan were invited. This important and delightful news cheered everyone. In the forest, under the moonlight and amidst joyous singing, they stood in a circle and hugged me one by one, some wishing me good health, some saying: “Teacher Tang, I shall do my best!”

Therefore, I feel that this honor is not for me alone. It is also for China’s younger generation who are pursuing nature conservation. It is also for people who are working selflessly on environmental issues. Indeed, they have done much more and much better than I. 

China is a unique country. It has a vast population and it still lacks awareness of environmental protection. Eighteen years ago when I was visiting Europe and America, I said: “Without democracy, there can be no everlasting green hills and clear waters.” I believe everyone can understand what I mean. Environmental protection is a monumental task. We cannot rely solely on the power of the government, on the economy or legislation. It is imperative that everyone is concerned and involved in ensuring that our environment stays green forever, and our planet remains sustainable. Thus, I am doing my utmost to write books and articles, to ensure the Green Camp’s mission is successful every year, and to travel all over China to give lectures and raise awareness about green culture. 

I am Chinese and Marcia was American; it was love of nature that brought us together. We traveled China together and visited fifty national parks and wildlife reserves in Europe, North America, and Asia. Also, together we wrote the book A Green World Tour. This book looks at the world from China’s perspective; at the same time, it looks at China from the whole world’s perspective. It seeks to share international experiences in environmental protection, and promote understanding and friendship among the world’s peoples. It had a profound impact on the development of environmental protection in China. Some people say Marcia and I were a beautiful union of east-west culture. Marcia used to say these simple yet profound words: “All those who love nature are good people.” Just think about it: if everyone loves nature, pursues the beauty and spirit of nature, then, we will be able to find our rightful place in this great, mysterious, beautiful and living world of nature. Man and nature will be in harmony. How can there still be indifference, selfishness, jealousy, deception, hate, terror and war amongst men? 

Today, as I am standing here to receive this award, I first would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for its support and encouragement. Special thanks to Mother Nature and my wife Marcia; they helped me rise from difficulties and confusion to become a dedicated nature conservationist. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for supporting my cause, my friends, my colleagues and the readers of my books, whom I have never met but have been a source of profound encouragement to me. China’s road to conservation of nature and environment is long and tortuous but I will continue my work resolutely. Thank you!