It is a commonplace phenomenon of our times that vast millions of Asia’s people eke out the days and years of their lives in city slums. In these makeshift neighborhoods, life goes on without the most basic services and with the constant threat of eviction. In Mumbai (Bombay), India, alone, some six million people live in such communities. JOCKIN ARPUTHAM knows this world intimately, for it is his world. As founder and leader of India’s National Slum Dwellers Federation, ARPUTHAM has made it his lifelong endeavor to change this world for the better. 

ARPUTHAM was born and raised in the gold fields of Karnataka. Never completing high school, he moved to Mumbai when he was eighteen. Here he discovered his true calling when fellow slum dwellers facing eviction rallied to his leadership. He became an activist. Seeking strength in numbers to resist eviction and to secure land tenure and services, ARPUTHAM made common cause with leaders of other informal settlements. In 1969, he formed the Bombay Slum Dwellers Federation, which he expanded in 1974 to become the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF). Today NSDF’s membership spans thirty-four Indian cities. 

The federation’s early years were dangerous ones and ARPUTHAM was often on the run. Gradually, however, he began to move beyond the problem of evictions and to help communities make advantageous transitions from slums to better neighborhoods’ transitions in which they themselves were the primary agents of change. This meant abandoning confrontational tactics and persuading government that poor people can be competent and responsible collaborators. 

In 1985, ARPUTHAM linked his federation with the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC). Together, NSDF and SPARC created Mahila Milan, a network of women’s collectives. These collaborating organizations shared a common belief: slum dwellers can learn the tools of self-reliance and in cooperation with their peers and NGO partners, achieve secure dwellings and safer, healthier neighborhoods. Their approach begins with savings circles run by women, then advances to complex projects such as income generation, neighborhood improvement schemes, and, often, the design and construction of new housing projects in post-eviction relocation sites. Through site visits and learning exchanges that tap the membership’s vast know-how, skills in money management, project planning, and construction are transferred directly from one member community to another. 

Meanwhile, the federation facilitates housing loans and assists in negotiations with government about evictions, demands for free relocation sites, and subsidized municipal services. ARPUTHAM himself is constantly on the front lines, dialoguing with community members; resolving conflicts; facilitating exchanges; and negotiating with officials, politicians, and banks. 

Through the same sorts of slum-to-slum learning exchanges that he initiated in India, ARPUTHAM has now extended his efforts to several neighboring countries. For ten years, he has assisted urban poor communities in South Africa to organize themselves and work effectively with the government, resulting in thousands of new low-cost homes. In Cambodia, he has helped the Squatter and Urban Poor Federation establish its credibility with government, leading to Cambodia’s first government-sponsored resettlement program for squatters. Likewise, ARPUTHAM has exported his federation?s community-organizing techniques and practical know-how to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines, and several countries in Africa. 

ARPUTHAM has now stepped down as president of the federation. But as a friend says, he still “works seven days a week, day and night, everywhere.” And he still has plenty of advice. Listen to women, he says, “They talk sense.” And when meeting with the government, “Go armed with a solution, not a problem.”

In electing JOCKIN ARPUTHAM to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his extending the lessons of community building in India to Southeast Asia and Africa and helping the urban poor of two continents improve their lives by learning from one another.

Excellencies, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, closest old friends, slum dwellers from Asia and Africa, dearest Mahila Milan, SPARC, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I would like to thank the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for recognizing the struggle of the urban poor and the creative initiatives of the urban poor all over the world. 

This award has come at the right time, when the urban poor face exclusion all over the world. This award recognises and acknowledges how the urban poor themselves are trying to bring about meaningful change by their own efforts. 

By choosing to award me with this honour, you honour all the poor in cities around the world who are seeking change — change not just for ourselves in our own lives but also for the good of the cities in which we have to live together. Thank you. 

This award means a lot to me because of the people who have received it before me. I think of Father Jeorge Anzorena who came to my own small hut twenty years ago. He looked up and down at me and I wondered who this new person was. Until now he has remembered me and supported our struggle in all the ways he could. He has been especially supportive of our building of a network among the urban poor. I am proud to be part of this struggle for justice and of the Ramon Magsaysay Award family. 

Let me look back to the time when I was fighting for drinking water, for sanitation and for a better quality of life in Janata Colony in Bombay — the slum where I lived and still live. How has the struggle moved forward and developed since Father Anzorena first came to visit? The biggest change is our movement through many countries as the urban poor have developed the means and will to link together and share across cities, across countries, across continents and across the world. In Janata Colony our houses were demolished in 1976. In 1991, I landed in South Africa and we decided to work together as Asians and Africans in this struggle against forced eviction and demolition. We decided to work together for the development of our communities. That led to the formation of the international networks of Slum/Shack Dwellers International — SDI — a network that is supported by others such as the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. We have new partnerships and instead of being arrested as we speak about poverty and development, we find ourselves sitting at tables with the authorities negotiating solutions. 

We are able to speak for ourselves within our cities, nationally and internationally. We have broken the culture of silence of the poor. No group has been more effective in doing this than the women of Mahila Milan. They use their daily savings and their own information collection and dissemination process to make themselves heard and to provide the basis of a dialogue between the poor and the authorities in the cities where they live. Now we are urban poor with a loud voice but we also want partners — partners who hear what we have to say and who are prepared to struggle with us. 

By giving this award to me you have declared support for the urban poor struggle and I thank you for this commitment on my own behalf and also on behalf of the urban poor all over the world. This award is now a torch in my hand, a light to shed on the invisibility in which we were shut, and from where we have moved forward. 

In this new light I would like to invite your excellency President Estrada, along with the people of the Philippines, to join me in showing how secure tenure can be used as a strong and important step in helping people to escape the trap of poverty that insecurity brings. Thank you.

For long years, the Indonesian press cowered beneath the vengeful power of the Soeharto dictatorship. Bold writers and editors tested the system’s limits from time to time, and clever ones maneuvered around them. But caution was the watchword. The habits of caution, however, did not prepare Indonesia’s media for the breathtaking change that followed Soeharto’s fall from power in 1998. This is something ATMAKUSUMAH ASTRAATMADJA often points out. As head of Dr. Soetomo Press Institute, he has labored to make press freedom a cornerstone of Indonesia’s new democratic edifice and, at the same time, to inculcate in the Indonesian media the profound responsibilities that freedom brings. 

ATMAKUSUMAH learned the fragility of press freedom early. He was a nineteen-year-old cub reporter at Mochtar Lubis’s crusading Indonesia Raya when, in 1958, President Sukarno abruptly closed the newspaper down. After working abroad as a radio broadcaster in Australia and Germany, ATMAKUSUMAH returned to Indonesia in 1965, just prior to the coup d’etat that ushered in Soeharto’s New Order. Working with Lubis again from 1968, he rose to managing editor of the revitalized Indonesia Raya. When Soeharto banned the paper in 1974, ATMAKUSUMAH was blacklisted. Finding steady work at the American embassy, he joined a quiet dialogue among thoughtful dissidents and waited for better times. 

In 1992, ATMAKUSUMAH joined the staff of Dr. Soetomo Press Institute, a postgraduate training school for journalists. As executive director from 1994, he guided the Institute through the waning days of the Soeharto dictatorship and became a spokesperson of stature in defense of a freer press. In the courts, he testified on behalf of editors and publishers accused of defaming the president in underground publications. And at the Institute, he taught students to investigate, probe, evaluate, and analyze the world around them aggressively. In time, he told them hopefully, they would be able to practice these skills in Indonesia. 

When Indonesia?s new government abandoned many Soeharto-era controls after May 1998, ATMAKUSUMAH worked assiduously behind the scenes to ensure that a draft media bill carried no vestige of government regulation. The result is a milestone. Passed in September 1999, the law denies government the authority to ban, censor, or license the press or to withhold any pertinent information. It also mandates the creation of a wholly independent National Press Council. ATMAKUSUMAH was an architect of the council and in May 2000 he was elected its first chairman. 

In the meantime, publications of all kinds proliferated in Indonesia?s new democratic space. Some were shockingly raw and sensational. Even journalists began to wonder if an unfettered press was a good thing. ATMAKUSUMAH assured them that, yes, it was. While acknowledging excesses, he defended the right of publishers to violate good taste just as staunchly as the right of reporters to investigate stories aggressively. Reining in abuses was a job for the profession itself, he said, not government. He urged his colleagues to submit to discipline by their peers and to adhere to a strict code of ethics. He then helped them draft such a code. The Press Council is now guided by it. Without a moral compass, he says, “the press is like a ship that has lost its beacon in dense fog.” 

In the midst of his busy life, sixty-one-year-old ATMAKUSUMAH remains a famously genial and dedicated teacher. As one of his colleagues says, ATMAKUSUMAH “can’t pass up a single conversation with a young journalist.” As for the future, he is sober. His country remains in the throes of a tumultuous political transition. “The struggle for media freedom,” he says, “is not yet over.”

In electing ATMAKUSUMAH ASTRAATMADJA to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his formative role in laying the institutional and professional foundations for a new era of press freedom in Indonesia.

Excellencies, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

It is a great honour and privilege for me to become the third Indonesian journalist to receive the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts in 42 years. 

The second Awardee, in 1995, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in a way was also a journalist although he is best known internationally as a literary writer. The first Awardee from Indonesia for the same category, in 1958, happens to be my former superior, Mochtar Lubis, the editor-in-chief of Indonesia Raya (Greater Indonesia), an independent daily publishing in Jakarta. The daily — a crusading newspaper, as people call it — was banned six times during the “guided democracy” of President Soekarno and once, but fatally, by President Soeharto’s government in January 1974. 

It was in 1958, 42 years ago, that as a 19-year-old cub reporter who had just begun a fledgling career as journalist for only several months, I tasted the suppression of press freedom. I wrote for the August 17 issue of Minggu (Sunday) Indonesia Raya the 17 August edition an “innocent” two-column front-page report on the first five Ramon Magsaysay Awardees including Mochtar Lubis who was then under house detention. But the Military Police who visited our office did not seem to like the piece, and warned my editor to discontinue the publication of similar reports. 

The second paragraph of that report I wrote read: “The announcement (of the Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation) said that Mochtar Lubis is best known in the international press circles as a fighter who has relentlessly fought against corruption in governments, violation of civil liberty by the military and the invasion of totalitarianism in Indonesia.”

Less than two months later, Indonesia Raya was forced to close down because the government refused to give a license to the newspaper. The Islamic-oriented Abadi (Eternal) Daily even decided to terminate its publication on the 1st of October of the same year in opposition to the newly established licensing system. The banning of tens of press publications continued for almost four decades under both the Soekarno and Soeharto regimes. 

The spirit of press freedom and free expression, however, never dies. 

I am glad to be told that my election as one of the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Awardees is a symbolic appreciation for the struggle of the Indonesian journalists and other concerned activists who have fought for a free press. 

I feel proud to have been able to work together with them for many years. They include organized and unorganized groups of journalists and university students, and supporters of human rights in many places throughout the country. Their deep concern for freedom and democracy prompted me to travel — oftentimes accompanied by my wife or my children — to about 30 cities and towns for the last 30 years to discuss with them, in open or closed meetings, the meaning of a free press in a democratic society. 

Thank you for the honor you have done my country. This is a great encouragement for morale of the younger generations who have to continue the fight for press freedom, free expression and democracy.

It is sad but true. Democratic government is not necessarily good government. Too often, elections yield power to the few, not the many. Injustices linger beneath the rhetoric of equality. Corruption and incompetence go on and on. Voters, alas, do not always choose wisely. And yet, in Asia and the world at large, much is at risk when democracy founders, because democracy is the hope of so many. JESSE MANALASTAS ROBREDO entered Philippine politics at a time when hope was high. As mayor of Naga City from 1988 to 1998 he demonstrated that democratic government can also be good government. 

In the wake of his country’s People Power Revolution in 1986, JESSE ROBREDO responded to President Corazon Aquino’s call to public service. He abandoned his executive position at San Miguel Corporation to head the Bicol River Basin Development Program in Naga, his hometown. In 1988, he stood for election as mayor and won by a slim margin. He was twenty-nine. 

Once the queen city of the Bicol region, Naga in 1989 was a dispirited provincial town of 120,000 souls. Traffic clogged its tawdry business district and vice syndicates operated at will. City services were fitful at best. Meanwhile, thousands of squatters filled Naga’s vacant lands, despite the dearth of jobs in the city’s stagnant economy. Indeed, Naga’s revenues were so low that it had been downgraded officially from a first-class to a third-class city. 

ROBREDO began with a strike against patronage. He introduced a merit-based system of hiring and promotion and reorganized city employees on the basis of aptitude and competence. He then moved against local vice lords, ridding Naga of gambling and smut. Next, he relocated the bus and jeepney terminals outside the city center, ending gridlock and spurring new enterprises at the city’s edge. In partnership with business, he revitalized Naga’s economy. Public revenues rose and by 1990 Naga was a first-class city again. ROBREDO’s constituents took heart and reelected him. 

Spurning bodyguards, ROBREDO moved freely among the people. By enlisting the support and active assistance of Naga’s NGOs and citizens, he improved public services dramatically. He established day-care centers in each of Naga’s twenty-seven districts and added five new high schools. He built a public hospital for low-income citizens. He set up a dependable twenty-four-hour emergency service. He constructed a network of farm-to-market roads and provided clean and reliable water systems in Naga’s rural communities. He launched programs for youth, farmers, laborers, women, the elderly, and the handicapped—drawing thousands into civic action in the process. No civic deed was too small, he told the people, including the simple act of reporting a broken street lamp. He sometimes swept the streets himself. 

Consistently, ROBREDO prioritized the needs of the poor. Through his Kaantabay sa Kauswagan (Partners in Development) program, over forty-five hundred once-homeless families moved to home-lots of their own. They became part of Naga’s revival. So did a revitalized city government. Applying techniques from business, ROBREDO raised performance, productivity, and morale among city employees. As a culture of excellence overtook the culture of mediocrity at City Hall, Naga’s businesses doubled and local revenues rose by 573 percent. 

Reelected without opposition in 1995, ROBREDO urged the Naga City Council to enact a unique Empowerment Ordinance. This created a People’s Council to institutionalize the participation of NGOs and people’s organizations in all future municipal deliberations. When obliged by law to step down after his third term, the popular ROBREDO made no effort to entrench his family. His advice to would-be leaders? “You have to have credibility.”

In electing JESSE ROBREDO to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes his giving credence to the promise of democracy by demonstrating that effective city management is compatible with yielding power to the people.

Your Excellency President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, First Lady Luisa Ejercito Estrada, members of the Magsaysay family, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen. 

The recognition accorded me tonight is an honor that our people in Naga most deserve. It is a fitting testimonial on our faith and confidence in a democratic society where people and government actively engage with each other in forging a collective decision. Our people have proven, that given the opportunity, we can rise above our parochial interests in the pursuit of common good. Given a choice, we will opt for good government despite the attendant obligations it requires. 

Last year, Asiaweek magazine acclaimed Naga City as one of the most improved cities in Asia. With a political environment that has effectively enshrined people empowerment, it has substantially achieved its development and institution-building goals. That recognition affirmed our belief that our people, given the chance, are in fact the most effective partners in our quest to improve their lot. 

Our decade-long experience has taught us valuable lessons in governance, accountability and constituency involvement. We had many obstacles and pains when we started to experiment with a governance system that veered away from the traditional. During that period, we were being threatened by decadent ways that inflicted the social, political and moral fabrics of the community: rampant illegal gambling, indecent entertainment, crime, occasional abuse by the powers-that-be, poor tax collection, rising unemployment and sheer indifference. Important political benefactors, whose interests run contrary to our reform agenda, disowned us. Businessmen who were my friends but were affected by the city’s honest-to-goodness tax collection campaign questioned our intentions and loyalties. 

We, however, stood our ground, strengthened our resolve and entrusted our fate to the people. We brought our office beyond the walls of City Hall and promised to make Naga a better place to live in. Communication lines were opened. The people felt comfortable telling us what they want, what they need and how we could best attain them. The Naguenos soon realized that they have found an ally in us. To our critics? dismay, the people rallied behind us. 

They rejected dirty politics and shun manipulations by those who have power and money. Instead they demanded for more efficient services and organized themselves into proactive sectoral groups not only as a means of extending influence but more importantly as a tool for developing themselves into responsive citizens who were sincerely involved in public affairs. 

Thus, we have institutionalized the urban poor federation whose members were given access to land, employment, housing, livelihood and basic services. Women’s groups were organized and trained to indulge in more productive endeavors such as livelihood development and environmental protection. Even homegrown cause-oriented groups during the tumultuous period of coups and armed confrontations asserted their role as mobilizers of popular democracy by declaring Naga City as a zone of peace, freedom and neutrality. 

Soon a People?s Council was forthwith established to ensure the continuing participation of NGOs and people’s organizations in city deliberations. 

Amidst all these are institutions of import in our community, which helped shaped the engagement between the local government and its constituency. We have an activist church that encourages us to seek and pursue the more difficult but righteous path. We have NGO and civil society groups, which now realize that their local government is a partner and not an adversary. We have academic institutions, which now seek to use its capability to address development issues affecting our locality. We have a business community, which after initial grumblings, came to realize that it is in their long-term interest that we take care of the poor and the less fortunate. We have a vigilant and free media, which despite its many excesses, nevertheless contributes to the transparent management of city affairs. In our dealings with these publics, there were a few occasions when we agreed to disagree. The relationship was however marked by tolerance, a willingness to listen and respect for the role that each one has to play. 

During my tenure, a number of newsmen have tried to defame me with unfounded accusations. A few groups dismissed some of my official acts as motivated by selfish political objectives. Perhaps they may have been right and that I may have erred in a few of my judgments. But whether they were right or wrong, I had often asked myself, as a result, these questions: Should I seek another alternative course of action? Or should I consult our people further to find out if there are far better ideas than the one I had? The bottom line was a response that involved our people even more in the decision making process. 

Indeed yielding power to the people is perhaps my greatest achievement as City Mayor. And the most important lesson that I have learned is that public servants should feel obliged to heed the people?s will always. Public servants are servant leaders. Their mission is “to serve and not to be served.”

Thank you very much.

We are familiar with corruption in high places. But what about corruption in low places? For example, how much of the development aid earmarked for Asia’s rural poor every year actually reaches the poor? Huge sums are involved. In India, the government spends some $200 million annually for rural assistance in the state of Rajasthan alone. This is where ARUNA ROY and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS, Organization for the Empowerment of Workers and Peasants) have been helping poor villagers find out where the money goes. They do so by asserting the people’s right to a single powerful weapon: information. 

As a junior officer in India’s prestigious Administrative Service, ARUNA ROY was exposed to her country’s diverse, poverty-stricken village world. She learned that she could not easily penetrate it, or change its ways, as an elite official. After seven years, she resigned from the Service and in 1974 moved to Rajasthan. There she joined the Social Work and Research Center (SWRC), a voluntary agency led by her husband and engaged in village-level development projects on health, education, gender, and livelihood. Her experience at SWRC convinced her that poor people must be the agents of their own economic and social improvement and, moreover, that political action is fundamental to their success. 

With this in mind, ROY and some fellow activists formed MKSS in 1990. Headquartered in the village of Devdungri, Rajasthan, their group accepted no external funds and spurned the trappings of prosperous NGOs. Living as the poor lived and eating as the poor ate, ROY and her comrades began assisting villagers to assert themselves against the local power structure. 

Using traditional forms of protest such as hunger strikes and sit-ins, MKSS-led villagers insisted that local people hired for state projects be paid the legal minimum wage. They forced a land-grabbing feudal lord to return encroached-upon properties to the entitled poor. Most provocatively, they held open-air public hearings at which official records of state development projects were exposed to the scrutiny of the intended beneficiaries. 

Shocking revelations followed: of toilets, schoolhouses, and health clinics recorded as paid for but never constructed; of improvements to wells, irrigation canals, and roads that remained noticeably unimproved; of famine and drought relief services never rendered; and of wages paid to workers who had been dead for years. Of the many development projects pursued by MKSS in Rajasthan, said one member, “not one has come out clean.” Such revelations embarrassed culpable officials and led to apologies and investigations and even to the return of stolen funds. 

Information was the key to every success: bills, vouchers, employment rolls. People have the right to audit their leaders, MKSS said. Thus, its campaign of public hearings also became a campaign for transparency in government. “Our money, our records,” chanted villagers. 

But officials were loathe to open their books. This prompted ROY and MKSS to launch a series of rallies culminating in a fifty-three-day protest in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, to compel the state to make its development-fund records public. The movement soon took on India-wide dimensions as the media and prominent intellectuals and political reformers joined in. As a result, right-to-information laws have now been passed in Rajasthan and three other states. A comprehensive national law is pending before the Government of India. 

ROY and her colleagues practice the transparency they preach, accounting scrupulously for their own expenditures to rural neighbors. At fifty-four, ROY remains driven. If an issue or a situation disturbs her, she says, “I am not comfortable until I do something about it.” 

In electing ARUNA ROY to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes her empowering Indian villagers to claim what is rightfully theirs by upholding and exercising the people’s right to information.

It is a great honor to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Though I have been singled out to receive the award, it in fact belongs to the many women and men with whom I have had the good fortune to share struggles and emerging visions for a better world. No individual, however endowed, can bring about social change on their own. Community work is a collective exercise, and the greatest potential and challenge of the human condition is to work together to realize dreams far beyond the barriers of individual limitations. It is my conviction that this is true for the work we do, the ideas we generate, as well as the leadership we create. 

One of the colossal tragedies that we face today is that in a world of plenty, we still have countless people who live in conditions of abject poverty and deprivation. Can we create conditions where our fellow citizens have an equal opportunity to contribute not just their labor, but also their knowledge, understanding and intelligent perception of change? Can we effectively challenge the established norms that limit the contribution of human beings because of hierarchies of exclusion? Are we willing to critically examine our own roles in perpetuating systems of exploitation through our actions and our silences? Do we not have equal rights to benefit from the common heritage of our planet? Can we work out the modes that will allow us to move towards an order based on the principles of justice and equality? Who will do so? How will we do it? 

I do not think any of us doubt the need to increase our levels of participation and involvement in issues of common interest. The universal attraction of democratic principles is that sovereignty rests with the people. But democracy is meaningful only when its specifics are worked out. 

The principles of democracy are universal. But for ordinary people, it is the practice of democracy that defines the principles. The socio-political circumstances of Asian countries like India, provide the opportunity to make democracy a vehicle of change, in which the collective wisdom of people is given the sanctity it deserves. Democratic struggle becomes both an end and a means to a more participatory form of governance. It is in this attempt to change from subjects to being the actual masters that the campaign for the people’s right to information took root in rural Rajasthan. Their collective understanding and contribution has changed the perspective of an academic and esoteric issue into a potent tool and principle of living. 

It has been a process that has illustrated the potential of relatively small groups of people working together to wage an ethical struggle against far more powerful adversaries. 

I feel honored most of all because I see this award as a recognition of those processes. The struggle in Rajasthan has not only drawn strength from community participation, but also from the understanding that communities, acting together to provide leadership, have greater resilience, energy and creativity than any individual. 

I come here today to accept this award, on behalf of the organizations I work with in Rajasthan and the many others in India who have energized this ongoing struggle. The cash prize will go to a trust recently set up to support individuals and organizations engaged in similar democratic struggles. 

I would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for providing a platform with which to share our perceptions. I also take the opportunity to urge the Foundation to include the eligibility of collectives and organizations in the category of Community Leadership. For it is to the collectives of ordinary people, the issues and processes they have fought for, and the greatness of their human spirit that this recognition truly belongs. Thank you.

Saying, “The machines are rumbling, and smoke is rising from the factories,” Mao Zedong signaled the onset of China’s industrialization. The staggering economic growth that followed was accompanied by political turmoil and the urgent strivings of a billion people for a better life. As a result, says LIANG CONGJIE, “few people had time to realize that the sky, rivers, and lakes had become severely polluted; the forests were disappearing; the grasslands were facing desertification; and biodiversity was being drastically reduced.” Mao’s dream produced “an environmental disaster,” LIANG says. Yet even today, too few people in China are aware of this disaster; even fewer are doing anything about it. As founder and president of China’s first nongovernmental organization dedicated to the environment, LIANG is changing this. 

Born in 1932 to a family of great intellectual distinction, LIANG came of age in the early years of Communist triumph in China. He embarked upon a career in teaching and scholarship and toiled in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Alerted to China’s looming environmental catastrophe in the 1980s, he began to study the problem and to discuss it with young Chinese familiar with the burgeoning environmental movement abroad. In 1994, he gained official permission to set up a voluntary society dedicated to environmental education: Friends of Nature (FON). Sixty people attended its first meeting. 

In joining FON, each member pledged to make a personal effort on behalf of China’s environment. LIANG channeled these efforts into seminars, teacher-training courses, slide shows, and lectures as well as bird-watching and tree-planting outings and wilderness camps for youths. He urged China’s mass media to highlight ecological issues and led reporters to compelling stories and authoritative information. He produced new educational materials and opened a public resource center. Meanwhile, FON criticized Chinese customs such as keeping wild songbirds as pets and opposed the takeover of China’s cities by automobiles. (Even today, LIANG prefers to ride a bicycle.) 

More controversially, LIANG orchestrated a national campaign to halt logging in the rainforests of southwestern Yunnan, the unique habitat of the endangered snub-nosed monkey. And he bravely exposed and helped to curtail huge poaching operations against the protected Tibetan antelope, the source of shatoosh, a silk-fine wool used in the world’s most expensive shawls. Similar FON campaigns have exposed illegal logging operations in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia and other violations of China’s extensive but inconsistently enforced environmental regulations. 

In the highly centralized political society of China, LIANG has drawn attention to ecological issues where it matters most-in the center. And by choosing his causes carefully and working closely with certain national and local officials, he has avoided the pitfall of alienating government, still China’s most powerful force for change. But by scrupulously maintaining FON’s independence, LIANG has also demonstrated the critical role that nongovernmental organizations can play in addressing China’s urgent public concerns. Moreover, he has produced a replicable model for his country?s new generation of voluntary organizations. 

Friends of Nature now has some seven hundred dues-paying members, plus thousands of affiliated students organized in local clubs. It is linked to like-minded organizations abroad. Still, its resources are limited. Sixty-seven-year-old LIANG remains the guiding hand. Cautious by nature, he is also deeply principled and can be fearlessly outspoken. Although his famous lineage gives him a certain useful celebrity, LIANG has consistently focused attention on the issues themselves and on the efforts of others, not on himself. 

China’s civil society is young and continues to evolve within a complex matrix of conflict and change. But there are reasons for optimism. In his interviews with the press, Liang says, the last question reporters often ask is, “How can I join?”

In electing LIANG CONGJIE to receive the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes his courageous pioneering leadership in China’s environmental movement and nascent civil society.

Your Excellency, President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, First Lady, Dr. Luisa Ejercito Estrada, members of the Magsaysay family, distinguished guests, trustees, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen. 

I feel greatly honored for being elected as one of the winners of the 2000 Ramon Magsaysay Award. 

I am a historian by training and have been working in education, academic and publishing circles for most of my early years. I am often asked why I particularly chose, at my retirement, environmental protection as a career to dedicate the rest of my life. The answer is simple: this is something really important to the future of my country, my people and my family, yet still neglected by most ordinary Chinese. 

Environmental degradation happened long ago in many countries, but it is particularly serious, even fatal, now in China. In her thousands of years? history, China’s population has never been so large, consequently the resources on a per capita level never been so little; the scope of her economy has never been so big, and the capability in changing nature with technological knowledge has never been so powerful. Furthermore, for hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese, the excitement and impulse to seek material comforts and pleasure, or to become an “instant millionaire” have never been so strong. It is very difficult to imagine how our natural resources and environment can be sustainable and healthily maintained under all such pressures. 

This was why a group of intellectuals with their profound sense of social responsibility, got together in 1993 to discuss what they could do to make a change. And that was the beginning of Friends of Nature, of which I am the leader. 

Do we have a ready solution or recipe? No. 

But we tried to make people aware of the danger ahead, the “iceberg in front of the Titanic” and make them think of the steps we can take together to save our common future. This is why Friends of Nature sets public environmental education as its main mission. We know that this is a mass movement of enlightenment and there will be a long way ahead of us. Our mission is to sow “green seeds” into people’s minds patiently and persistently, like the farmers sowing in their field. Because this is what we believe, only when people’s hearts are becoming “greener”, will there be a green future for China. 

Seven years have passed since the four initiators of Friends of Nature had their first meeting. Now we have nearly one thousand individual members and more than 3000 corporate members all over the country. Maybe this is small Western standards, but Friends of Nature is growing steadily and becoming one of the most influential NGOs in China, Friends of Nature has brought to this country a truly independent voice, at least in the environment field. The Chinese government also found in us an ally. They awarded me several times, in my capacity as the President of Friends of Nature, and on the eve of the International Environment Day of year 2000 they formally gave me the title of “Environment Envoy”, which means a social inspector. Yet Friends of Nature and I never cease to alert watchers and critical observers on all environmental issues in China. 

It is obvious that Friends of Nature and myself cannot gain any of the achievements without the warm and firm support from all our friends in China as well as in other countries and now, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. And this is equally true of my wife, and all my devoted and hardworking fellow members. This is why, on behalf of all our members, I invite Mrs. Zhang Jilian, Director of FON’s office, to come and share with me this extraordinary moment your distinguished foundation is now giving me to. 

This award is surely a great encouragement to me as well as to Friends of Nature. It is also a reminder to me that the road ahead of us is still long and even more difficult. I will always bear in mind that a good environment and sustainable development will not only be crucial to the future of my motherland, but will also benefit our neighboring countries, as well as all peoples in the world. Thank you.