The end of empire not only reconfigured Asia’s political life, it also changed its business and industry. As Asians asserted their leadership, foreign managers departed, bureaucrats and military men found themselves managing important resources and assets, and family-owned firms began to transform themselves into professionally managed corporations. Yet competent managers were in short supply. For young Asians seeking formal business training there were few options, all the more so for the vast majority who could not afford to study in the West.

Responding to this need were Philippine businessmen Washington SyCip and Ramon V. del Rosario. With Harvard professor Stephen Fuller, they broached in 1956 the idea of pooling institutional resources to create a single superior business school for Asia. This idea bore fruit in 1968 when Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle Universities joined forces to establish the ASIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT, or AIM. Fuller became the founding president; SyCip, chairman of the board—a post he holds until now. Early financial support came from the Ford Foundation, USAID, and, most importantly, Filipino industrialist Eugenio Lopez, Sr. The Ayala Corporation provided land in the burgeoning business district of Makati for a new campus, which opened in 1970.

AIM’s original course was the two-year Masters in Business Management. Instruction was based on the famous case method developed at Harvard Business School. In the beginning, AIM functioned primarily to transfer Western management principles and techniques to Asia. An early objective of the Institute, however, was to expand its bank of Asian cases to present its students with authentically Asian solutions to the region’s management problems. Guided both by a local board of trustees and an international board of governors, AIM has been striving in this direction ever since.

A one-year Master in Management Program, inaugurated in 1974, was the first of AIM’s innovations in response to the fast-changing needs of the region. New programs soon followed tailored especially for air transport managers, marketing managers, bank managers, and, since 1985, for rural and general development managers—an endeavor that reflects the Institute’s commitment to “the disadvantaged, the underprivileged, and the poor.” There also came short courses for middle and senior executives and workshops for government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and women in business. Many of these are offered outside the Philippines. Today, AIM executes some twenty distinct programs each year.

Like the business of Asia, the impact of AIM transcends national borders. To date, some twenty thousand individuals have received AIM training, more than half from dozens of neighboring countries, conspicuously Indonesia and Malaysia. Through its business magazine and management awards, as well as offices in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, AIM maintains a high profile throughout Asia. Most importantly, its graduates fill the senior and middle ranks of some of the region’s best-run companies and serve widely in government. Research and consulting complement the work of teaching for AIM’s international faculty, and keep the Institute’s “case bank” abreast of the latest trends and problems. Although foundation and development agency grants provide welcome support for AIM’s research, the school relies largely on the marketability of its programs and services to pay the bills.

Since 1972, when Sixto Roxas became president, Filipinos have led AIM. Today the president is long-time AIM faculty member, Felipe B. Alfonso. Under his direction, AIM looks pragmatically ahead, keeping its courses and programs fresh and anticipating an ever greater need for astute, well-trained, and Asia-sensitive managers as the Pacific Century approaches.

In electing the ASIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes its setting regionwide standards for excellence and relevance in training Asians to manage Asia’s business and development.

The ASIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT is honored to be the Ramon Magsaysay awardee for international understanding. This award is meaningful because we have gone beyond those early days when we were identified as the “Harvard Business School of Asia,” since we were established with the assistance of the Harvard Business School. This label was a flattering comparison, but hardly original and defensible, not at all innovative.

The ASIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT was started by elite schools, Ateneo and La Salle, and by elite business families such as the Ayalas and the Lopezes. We were a simple conduit of Western management principles to Asian managers. We delivered these principles well to our Master’s in Business Management (MBM) students, many of whom have come into their own as chief executive officers. Nonetheless, AIM had to innovate, to be more than just an elite institution for elite Asians.

Early on, we determined that business could not survive without the concurrent development of the countryside. Profitable business could not ignore social upliftment for Asia’s disadvantaged people. It was in this context that in the seventies we pioneered our first RDMP, or Rural Development Management Program. In the RDMP, we performed action research and wrote case studies about how we could improve the lot for our poor, ignored rural areas. This has since evolved into our Center for Development Management, or CDM, which comprises a one-year master’s program for development management, as well as short courses and forums that specifically address developing country needs. We invited participation from government and NGOs, as well as funding agencies such as the Asian Development Bank, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Ford Foundation, and others, into our action research. Ramon Magsaysay would have been proud of AIM: it is now a win-win, collaborative merger of the elite schools and businesses, funding agencies, government, and NGOs, working together toward the total development of Asia.

On a parallel track, we have continued to perform case research on Asian managerial and for-profit enterprise practices. We have translated all of these efforts into our redesigned two-year MBM, one-year Master’s in Management (MM), and short-term Executive Education (EE) programs.

Together our development and enterprise programs have generated over twenty-three thousand alumni in the last twenty-seven years. We are proud to say that our alumni are in policy-making and decision-making positions, trying to make life a little easier and more uplifting for the next generations of Asians.

We, the faculty and staff, would not have achieved so much were it not for the support of all AIM governors, trustees, social investors, and alumni. Because of them, AIM is a dynamic learning institution responding to the changing trends in the region.

We share with all of you this honor. You are part of our success. With deep gratitude for your contributions, we will take up the challenge to prove ourselves worthy of this distinction. We will not rest on our laurels. May the Ramon Magsaysay Award inspire us to higher and higher achievements.

As a youth in Java, his birthplace, PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER completed a few years of grammar school and briefly studied radio repair. He was just seventeen whens, in 1942, the Japanese invaded and overtook the Netherlands Indies, of which Java was part. In the limbo of wartime he studied stenography and, fixing early on his life’s work, wrote a first novel that was subsequently lost. As a prisoner of the Dutch during the ensuing revolution, he drew upon the turmoil of the times to compose The Fugitive and Guerrilla Family, novels that established his reputation. Following independence, PRAMOEDYA wrote prolifically about the corrosive influence of poverty, social confusion, and corruption in the new nation of Indonesia and emerged as the modern fiction master of its national language.

In Indonesia’s bitter Left-Right power struggle of the early 1960s, PRAMOEDYA chose the Left. Although never a member of Indonesia’s large and legal Communist Party, he affiliated himself prominently with its cultural institute and became editor of the literary page of a left-wing newspaper. He clashed openly with writers and intellectuals of differing views. At the same time, PRAMOEDYA pursued privately an intense study of Indonesian history and wrote The Girl from the Coast, a novel inspired by the unfortunate life of his grandmother.

PRAMOEDYA was arrested in the immediate wake of the September coup attempt of 1965, which ushered in Indonesia’s New Order. As other left-wing Indonesians were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, the army on Java detained him. His library was looted and burned. Later, the military-led government transferred him to a work camp for political prisoners on remote Buru Island. Denied writing materials until 1975, PRAMOEDYA embarked upon an ambitious historical saga by telling stories out loud to fellow inmates. This Earth of Mankind became the first of his innovative Buru tetralogy: four linked novels depicting the dawn of Indonesian national awareness.

PRAMOEDYA was released in 1979 to the custody of military authorities in Jakarta, where he has lived under “town arrest” ever since. This Earth of Mankind and his other Buru books enjoyed brisk sales when they were ultimately published. But the Indonesian government quickly banned them. Branded as subversive, they remain illegal in Indonesia today, along with all of PRAMOEDYA’s writing.

Yet PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER’s fiction is not political in any narrow sense. It dwells on themes of humanity and social justice. Ranged against the aspirations indeed against the full humanity of his characters are the historical evils of foreign rule and indigenous feudalism as well as the immediate circumstances of war, poverty, and tumult. His stories are imbued with a painful awareness of the moral frailty of human beings in the face of such domineering forces and extreme conditions. Yet they also celebrate the resilience and dignity of men and, notably, women who survive honorably amidst humiliation, privation, and danger. A master storyteller, PRAMOEDYA writes with compassion but not sentimentality. And although his stories are quintessentially Indonesian, and rooted especially in the Javanese tradition, they speak with eloquence to the universal human condition the reason, no doubt, that they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Despite the potentially crippling losses of a turbulent lifetime including countless unpublished manuscripts PRAMOEDYA carries on today compiling a social geography of Indonesia, the land he loves. Still officially a pariah in his own country, he claims to have no clear political ideas. He says, simply, “I am a writer.”

In electing PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his illuminating with brilliant stories the historical awakening and modern experience of the Indonesian people.

It is a great honor to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award; moreover, my family and I consider it a great personal privilege. This award has also helped to illuminate the fate of hundreds and thousands of people like myself.

The winds of global change continue to blow on a global level as well as regionally within our own shores. Indeed, the dream for a better society rarely comes true smoothly and easily; the challenges to our human creativity and our resilience are great and manifold. Still, we discern the pulse of progress. The people of the Philippines, as also the people of Indonesia, through their own history, are very much aware of this.

I salute the Magsaysay Foundation, which is playing an active role in, and making an invaluable contribution to, this process of change.

The 1995 award more especially commends us all; it highly commends the Foundation. To me, this award is a sign of moral courage and support, as it is to all those who sincerely endeavor to uphold human dignity and human rights, who serve truth and justice, and who earnestly strive for the emancipation of all, at home and in the whole wide world. I am proud to receive this award and shall always hold it in high esteem. I will do my best to keep it with dignity and gratitude, fully aware of my calling as a writer and as a human person, and, most importantly, as an Indonesian citizen in this year of my beloved country’s golden anniversary, Indonesia Emas.

May this award help to bring about a historical shift in the journey of humankind in order to reduce and even to do away with whatever difficulties or obstacles there may be.

I am convinced that this award will broaden the road of friendship between the Indonesian people and the Filipino people, the people of Japan, Pakistan, and Taiwan indeed, of all the peoples of Asia.

May God in God’s mercy grant that only the very best will happen to us all.

For Tokyo and other Japanese metropolises, the post-World War II boom years were the best of times. Not so, however, for Japan’s remote provinces and rural areas. Here, incomes declined and populations dwindled as young people drifted away in search of better lives in the city. Oita Prefecture, on the northeast coast of Kyushu Island, was such a place. Once Japan’s gateway to the outside world and an early center for Western learning in Asia, by the 1970s Oita was merely a backwater. In a nation rising quickly to wealth, Oita idled in relative poverty.

Governor MORIHIKO HIRAMATSU has changed this.

Born in Oita City in 1924, HIRAMATSU rose through local schools and served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Later he studied law at Tokyo University and, upon graduating in 1949, joined the powerful national ministry now known as MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. There he helped to regulate and advise Japan’s emerging electronics industry and observed the world-changing impact of computer technology. In 1975, he returned to Oita as vice-governor. Four years later he was elected governor.

How to revitalize Oita? Solving this problem became HIRAMATSU’s passion. Certain regions, he knew, had made a name for themselves by producing signature products—tangerines, pottery, shiitake mushrooms. Why not encourage every community to devote itself to a single product in which it could truly excel? This concept became the basis of HIRAMATSU’s innovative development plan: One village, one product.

Exploiting the spirit of local rivalry rooted in Oita’s feudal past, HIRAMATSU incited competition among the prefecture’s diverse communities as each one sought to identify and perfect a product of its own: Kakosu limes, Himeshima prawns, Oyama plums, and Beppu bambooware and hot springs. Building self-reliance was an important goal of the program. There were no subsidies. Instead, HIRAMATSU provided technical assistance to improve the local goods and to develop “value-added” byproducts: sauces and jams from the prefecture’s cornucopia of fruits; chowders, dried sardines, and animal feed from its marine life. The prefecture also publicized and marketed Oita’s products. Governor HIRAMATSU himself became the prefecture’s preeminent salesman.

HIRAMATSU complemented the “one village, one product” movement by aggressively recruiting high-tech industries to Oita and by building an infrastructure commensurate with the prefecture’s growing economy. Today, Oita’s flowers and mushrooms can be flown directly to markets in Tokyo—”ninety minutes fresh.” And futuristic new towns called Greenpolis, Marinopolis, and Technopolis are being developed as centers for forest, marine, and high-tech industries as well as centers for research and education.

“Think globally, act locally” is a motto HIRAMATSU repeatedly invokes. Oita should not become an economic appendage of Tokyo, he asserts, but a free-standing participant in the borderless economy of the globe. This is why Oita’s signature products are marketed aggressively abroad and why the governor has been vigorous in promoting foreign exchange programs and special events that link its citizens to dozens of countries around the world. Moreover, for several years now HIRAMATSU has been preaching the benefits of the “one village, one product” system to local governments near and far. From Louisiana (“One parish, one product”) to Fujian (“One village, one treasure”), HIRAMATSU’s idea is catching on.

Meanwhile, life in Oita is getting better. Unemployment is down. Incomes are up. And for Oita’s young people, a good future now beckons at home. Little wonder that ever-smiling HIRAMATSU has been elected governor five times running.

In electing MORIHIKO HIRAMATSU to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his awakening Oita prefecture to self-reliant economic growth through the “one village, one product” movement and a spirited call for local products with global appeal.

It is a great honor and privilege for me to receive this world-famous award, which is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Asia.” I must say, however, that I cannot accept this Award alone. I humbly accept this Award on behalf of all the people of my prefecture who are persistently working toward regional revitalization.

Furthermore, this Award will not only encourage the people of Japan involved in the “One Village, One Product” Movement but, I believe, it will inspire the people of various regions of Asia who have adopted this movement as well. The ultimate goal of the “One Village, One Product” Movement is to foster human resources. I sincerely hope that the movement will further create people who can think globally and act locally.

Last year, the first Asia-Kyushu Regional Summit was held in Oita. And the next summit will be here in Manila in October of this year. It is my earnest hope that this award, together with the summit, will further facilitate the peaceful interchange between various regions of Asia.

I would like to thank you once again for the great honor that you have bestowed upon me and, with my heartfelt gratitude, I accept this Award.

On any given Sunday morning in the small city of Chiayi in south-central Taiwan, a merry band of citizens can be seen boarding trucks and riding off to the countryside. In private cars and on motorcycles, others join the convoy until, from near and far, they all assemble at a single site beside a river. Donning bamboo sun hats and baseball caps, the pilgrims take up shovels and hoes, baskets and pails, to build a bridge. Leading the party will be seventy-three-year-old HO MING-TEH, a bald and jolly Pied Piper who has built more than two hundred bridges in Taiwan’s Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties during the past twenty-five years.

HO Ming-teh, a devout Buddhist and former grocer, had already embarked upon a few modest projects, mending local roads and suspension bridges, when in 1971 a flood swept away an old wooden bridge in nearby Chungpu Township and took the lives of two brothers. As HO well knew, the countryside was full of decrepit wooden bridges. Moreover, no bridges at all spanned many of the region’s rivers and streams; to reach towns and markets, rural folk had to ford them. Bridges were needed—proper concrete bridges. HO resolved to build them.

Straightaway, he launched a fundraising campaign and, in just a few months, his first bridge was completed. Since then, HO’s bridges have been rising at the rate of nine a year.

Although trained as a youth in civil engineering, HO was not a professional bridge builder. He arranged for professional engineers and contractors to do the technical work. But he himself could assess the need for a bridge, draw up a plan, purchase the materials, and coordinate with local officials. He could also raise the money. To emphasize the spirit of giving, HO limited individual contributions to just a few dollars per project; yet private donations have yielded all the money needed for HO’s many bridges: more than U.S.$12 million over the years. In addition, HO invited everyone to join him each Sunday in the good deed of bridge-building, performing the many simple chores that require no technical skill. More than two hundred thousand volunteers have done so.

HO organized his projects casually, at first with no formal organization at all. But as one new bridge after another rose at his initiative, local newspapers anointed HO and his partners the Chiayi Philanthropy Group. He adopted the name formally on the day he inaugurated his one-hundredth bridge. Up till now, however, HO’s organization—which also helps poor families meet burial expenses—has no membership list or formal charter. Whoever chooses to contribute, contributes; whoever wishes to work, works. HO himself keeps the books, and his scrupulous reports to donors have earned the Chiayi Philanthropy Group a reputation for unshakable integrity.

HO’s concrete bridges vary in length from just a few meters to over one hundred; with distinctive white railings, each one is a replica of the other. Simple and strong, they dot the countryside, moving farm products swiftly and efficiently to market, opening once remote areas to tourism, and rendering daily travel safer. They are an incalculable practical boon to the people of Yunlin, Chiayi, and Tainan Counties.

But they are also something more. These bridges have motivated many thousands of Taiwanese to devote themselves weekly to the cheerful work of helping others. HO Ming-teh, the inspiring force, seeks no credit. Buddhism, he notes, enjoins its followers to do good. And so he does.

In electing HO MING-TEH to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his improving rural Taiwan with good deeds and sturdy bridges.

It gives me great pleasure this evening to be the recipient of the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership. First of all, I would like to express my sincerest appreciation to the board of trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for bestowing upon me this special honor.

However, I must reiterate that I am just a member of the eighty-thousand-strong Chiayi Philanthropy Group in the Republic of China on Taiwan. In the past twenty-odd years, believing that “doing good is the greatest source of happiness” and that “to do good is to invoke Heaven’s blessings and accumulate virtues,” all the group members have worked together to construct a total of 215 bridges in Taiwan’s rural areas. In building these bridges, our hearts are overflowing with joy and we have never entertained any thought of being awarded for what we have done. It is our belief that bridges will not only facilitate transportation but also bring people closer together psychologically, thus conducing to a happy and harmonious society. Therefore, this award is not so much a personal commendation as a recognition of what the group as a whole has been doing. We are committed to building even more bridges to benefit even more people.

In closing, I wish to pay my high tribute to what the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation has achieved over the past decades by setting up awards in memory of the late President Ramon Magsaysay to advocate freedom, universal love, and justice. It is my earnest hope that the Foundation will encourage more people to do good and to march toward a bright future, thus contributing toward peace and stability worldwide.

“All citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law.” This and other fundamental rights are enshrined within the Constitution of Pakistan. Yet recent efforts to Islamize Pakistan have compromised the secular spirit of the constitution: laws protecting women have been weakened; blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad is now punishable by death. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, it is common in Pakistan today for women and girls to be assaulted, raped, and murdered without any practical recourse to justice; at the same time, minority sects and free thinkers in the country stand virtually unprotected against malicious attacks by religious zealots.

Under these vexing circumstances, ASMA JAHANGIR, a lawyer, strives to apply the laws of her country fairly; but where the laws of Pakistan do not conform to a humane and equitable standard, she also strives to change them.

JAHANGIR was only eighteen years old when she stepped into the limelight to challenge her father’s arrest by Pakistan’s martial law government. By the age of twenty-eight, she had married and opened a law practice in Lahore with her sister, Hina Jilani, and two other women. Most of her clients were women. For them, JAHANGIR and her partners often represented the only hope for justice in a society where traditional attitudes and practices weighed heavily against females. As her law practice grew, JAHANGIR threw herself into the broad struggle for reform in Pakistan. She clashed fearlessly with the military government of Zia-ul Haq and, in 1984, was arrested for sedition. In 1986, she became founding secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, dedicated to documenting the rampant mistreatment and exploitation of women, children, minorities, and laborers and to bringing Pakistan within the pale of international human rights standards.

Under new laws promulgated amid the Islamization of the 1980s, a woman in Pakistan who accuses a man of rape may easily fall victim to the countercharge of zina, the crime of adultery and sex-out-of-wedlock. Over 80 percent of the women in jail in Pakistan today have been arrested on exactly this charge. JAHANGIR’s law firm advises and defends such women and pleads forcefully against laws that jeopardize females; meanwhile, its free legal aid center provides reader-friendly pamphlets and a team of paralegal assistants to educate women about their current rights and legal options.

Pakistan’s blasphemy law is notoriously subject to abuse. Victims of spurious charges (in some cases, illiterate youths and targets of personal vendettas—Christian and Muslim alike) have been herded into court or, worse, beaten or murdered by fanatical self-anointed religious Purifiers. JAHANGIR calls the law “terrifying” and has defended several of its victims, winning important victories in the Supreme Court. She is mobilizing support for the law’s repeal and, in the meantime, for safeguards against its capricious abuse.

Asked to become Pakistan’s first woman judge in 1994, JAHANGIR declined, saying, “It would be hypocrisy to be a judge and defend laws that I don’t believe in.”

Working ten hours a day and more, with not enough time to savor her three children, ASMA JAHANGIR struggles on many fronts to stem the tide of theocratization and lawlessness in Pakistan. She is optimistic. As the outcome hangs in the balance, however, her bold stand for pluralism and fundamental human rights angers the country’s religious conservatives and zealots. Some merely stigmatize her as a “modern woman.” Others threaten to kill her.

In electing ASMA JAHANGIR to receive the 1995 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes her challenging Pakistan to embrace and uphold the principles of religious tolerance, gender equality, and equal protection under the law.

It is a great honor for me to accept this prestigious Award. My colleagues of the human rights movement and I thank you for this support. My struggle is not a lonely one but a struggle shared by many women and men of integrity and purpose. We are committed to uphold those values of human rights that call for equality, justice, and equity for all peoples—a world without discrimination of any manner whatsoever, a world where people can live a life free of exploitation.

The Magsaysay Award has a special significance, as it comes from a country that is rich with a tradition of liberation movements and a society that has the most active and robust social action groups. This honor bestowed by you is like recognition by one’s own family, which has its own special value.

While I accept the Award, I feel embarrassed as well. Embarrassed when I compare what little we have achieved against what has still to be achieved. Our first small steps are only the beginning of a very long, arduous, and painful struggle to establish justice in our societies. By complimenting and coordinating our efforts as fellow Asians, we are sure to strengthen our cause. This Award has placed a grave responsibility on me to prove worthy of it. I assure you that your generosity will assist me in spawning similar awards for human rights and civil liberties in Pakistan.

On behalf of my husband and myself, I thank the trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for their warm hospitality and an opportunity to visit this beautiful country.