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.

Nangi Village, where MAHABIR PUN was born, rests high in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal. Here and in surrounding Myagdi District live the PUN Magar, whose men for generations have soldiered across the globe as Gurkhas. Yet, their worldly careers have done little to change their sleepy homeland, so far from the traffic patterns that knit together the rest of the world. Indeed, Nangi is seven hours’ hard climb from the nearest road. No telephone lines have ever reached it. Despite this, these days the people of Nangi are definitely connected to the world outside. Wireless Internet technology has made this possible. MAHABIR PUN has made it happen. 

PUN passed his boyhood grazing cattle and sheep in mountain pastures and attending a village school that had no paper or pencils or books. Wanting more for his son, PUN’s father moved the family to Nepal?s lowlands, where, in Chitwan, PUN finished high school and became a teacher, working for twelve years to help his younger siblings through school. Finally, a timely scholarship led him to a bachelor?s degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Then, in 1992, after more than twenty years away, PUN returned home to Nangi, determined to make things easier for other youths than they had been for him. 

Nangi’s leaders were busy establishing a village high school. PUN eagerly joined in. Once a month, he made the two-day trip to the nearest major town of Pokhara to check his email and maintain his links to friends abroad. This led, in 1997, to the donation of four used computers from Australia. Powering them with hydro-generators in a nearby stream, PUN began teaching computer classes at the Nangi High School. More computers followed, but it proved impossible to get a telephone connection to Pokhara and the Internet. 

PUN emailed the British Broadcasting Corporation, asking for ideas. In 2001, the BBC publicized his dilemma and within a year volunteers from Europe and the United States were helping him rig a wireless connection between Nangi and the neighboring village of Ramche, using TV dish antennas mounted in trees. Some small grants soon led to the construction of improvised mountaintop relay stations and a link to Pokhara. By 2003, Nangi was online. 

As word of PUN’s project bounced around the World Wide Web, backpacking volunteers carried more and more donated computers, parts, and equipment into the hills. PUN expanded the wireless network to embrace twelve villages-distributing ninety used computers to local schools and communication centers, connecting them to the Internet, teaching teachers how to use them, and then troubleshooting until everything worked. 

Today, connectivity is changing Myagdi. Using PUN’s “tele-teaching” network, good teachers in one school now instruct students in others. Local health workers use Wi-Fi to consult specialists in Pokhara. Once-isolated students surf the Net and are learning globe-savvy skills. Villagers e-market local products such as buffaloes, honey, teas, and jams and use the Web to draw paying trekkers to campsites outfitted with solar-powered hot showers. In parallel projects, the people of Nangi have added a library, health clinic, and new high-school classrooms. Meanwhile in Kathmandu, PUN has successfully lobbied parliament to legitimize and democratize wireless technology in Nepal. 

PUN, now fifty-two, is both self-effacing and charismatic. “I’m not in charge of anything,” he says. Yet, he seems to be the driving force of much around him. Eventually, he says, the people of Myagdi District will have to carry on for themselves. In the meantime, he hopes to play his unique role indefinitely. “As long as I can walk,” PUN says happily, “I can do this.” 

In electing MAHABIR PUN to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his innovative application of wireless computer technology in Nepal, bringing progress to remote mountain areas by connecting his village to the global village.

The Honorable Chief Justice, Chairman and Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow awardees, and brothers and sisters. 

All of us grow up with lots of wishes. And we know for a fact that many of the wishes that we make can’t be fulfilled. As a young boy my wishes were to have enough food to eat, and warm clothes and shoes to wear. I wished to have books to read, pens and papers to write on. As I grew older, I wished to go to college and to become an engineer so that I could get a better job and have a good life. However, many of my were wishes not fulfilled. 

Memories of my old days’ unfulfilled wishes have become my vision of creating better educational opportunities for rural children and creating job opportunities for disadvantage people so that they can have meaningful, peaceful and better lives. The wireless network that we created in some of the mountain villages for educational, medical, and local e-commerce purposes was just a small part of my vision to create better learning opportunities for the children, to provide medical assistance to villagers during emergency situations, and to bring communication tools for the villagers. We still have a long way to go to make the wireless technology truly useful for the people, and to replicate the wireless network all over the country. 

I am not the only person to have this vision. This was the vision of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, who worked hard to improve the lives of fellow Filipinos and helped them live freely, happily and with justice. This is a common vision of all young people, parents, and community leaders around the world, who are working hard to help others live happily with justice and in liberty. 

However, I never wished to get any kind of award. For the last fifteen years, I was working only to fulfill my vision within my capacity. Therefore this award was the greatest surprise of my life, and I am very thankful for it. This award has boosted my spirit very much and I feel much younger now even if I have crossed half a century of my life. 

Let me share with you my lifelong vision, for I believe that visions will only be wishes if we don’t share it and work on it. The first vision I have is to set up vocational training schools for rural people so that the young can get better jobs in the national and international job market. The second is to help people start income generating programs in rural areas that are viable there to create the local economy and to create jobs locally. My third vision is to establish a college by 2015 and a university later on for the children of poor people, who can’t afford to go to college or university. My fourth vision is to bring information and communication technology to the remote villages of my country and use it for educational, medical, commercial and communication purposes. I am working on this vision with like-minded fellows in Nepal. 

This international recognition will be helpful for us to reach the visions that I mentioned. In this way, we will be able to help a little to make the vision of late President Ramon Magsaysay come true. We will make it happen not by word but by deed. 

Thank you.

JOVITO SALONGA’s long life began only twenty-two years after the onset of American rule in the Philippines. His youth was a time of national hope and longing for independence. These things shaped him, alongside his family’s deep Christian convictions and the hardships of their daily life. When he was twelve, a speech by the independence-champion Manuel Roxas in his hometown stirred him to dream of a life in law and in public life. 

Seizing on this ambition, he rose through public schools to the College of Law at the University of the Philippines. When war overtook his studies, SALONGA quickly ran afoul of the new Japanese authorities. He was tortured and jailed and released after nearly a year. Amid dearth and uncertainty, he crammed for the bar examinations and, in 1944, earned the highest score. 

At war’s end, SALONGA embraced Philippine independence but denounced “parity rights” and other compromising ties to the United States. He topped off his legal education with graduate degrees from Harvard and Yale universities and then plunged headlong into the life of his new nation. 

SALONGA established himself as a sought-after lawyer and an influential legal scholar and educator. In 1961, the Liberal Party tapped him for a successful run for Congress in his home province of Rizal. Four years later, he outpolled all other candidates for the Senate — a feat he repeated twice. He built his reputation as a crusader for clean government and public education. As a staunch nationalist, he opposed Philippine complicity in the Vietnam War and other acts of “puppetry.” And he so persistently exposed the troubling anomalies of President Ferdinand Marcos that the Philippines Free Press named him the “Nation’s Fiscalizer.” 

The bomb that crippled him at a political rally in 1971, SALONGA says, led him to a second, “borrowed life.” He opposed Martial Law from the start, defending opponents of the Marcos dictatorship and working tirelessly for the succor and release of political prisoners and for the democratic opposition. In 1980, he himself was jailed without charges and then released. Four years in exile followed. 

Yet he never lost hope. In 1985, SALONGA returned home to revitalize his political party and confront the dictatorship. Putting aside personal ambition, he withdrew his candidacy for vice president in the snap elections of February 1986 and threw himself heart-and-soul into Corazon Aquino’s presidential campaign and the People Power Revolution. 

Afterwards, SALONGA initiated the new government’s legal efforts to reclaim wealth stolen by the Marcoses. In 1987, voters returned him to the Senate. There, he authored new laws protecting the state from plunder, military coups, and corrupt officials and, in 1991 as Senate President, triumphantly led his colleagues in ejecting American military bases from the Philippines. 

SALONGA returned to private life the following year, having made a hotly contested but disappointing bid for the presidency. But through his NGOs, Bantay Katarungan (Sentinel of Justice) and Kilosbayan (People’s Action), he has sustained his principled interventions in the affairs of the nation up till now. 

SALONGA relishes the point-and-counterpoint of democratic politics. But to SALONGA politics is not a game. There is a right and a wrong. Democracy is right. Social justice is right. The rule of law, honest and competent government, compassion for the poor, pride in country-all are right. 

To be sure, these are the familiar mantras of Philippine politics. But to SALONGA they are a creed. His rare moral authority stems from a simple fact: he practices what he preaches. Today, at eighty-seven, SALONGA urges young people to seek happiness in service. More important in life than wealth is meaning. We will find it, he says, if we live “by what we know to be true and good.” 

In electing JOVITO SALONGA to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the board of trustees recognizes the exemplary integrity and substance of his long public career in service to democracy and good government in the Philippines.

I was cited by the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation for “the exemplary integrity and substance of (my) long public career in service to democracy and good government in the Philippines.” I am humbled by the award and I accept it, with humility and gratitude. 

But what separates me from other political leaders is not known to many people here in the Philippines. It is the fact that I do not separate my religion from my political beliefs and from public service. As Mahatma Gandhi, the great teacher of peace and non-violence in a non-Christian nation, said many years ago: “Those who say that politics and religion do not mix do not know the meaning of religion.” 

In my own case, because of my own religious upbringing — my father was a Presbyterian pastor and my mother was a woman of faith and spirituality — it was inevitable that my Christian beliefs and values should motivate and influence my thinking and my acts every day and every hour. 

I would be less than truthful if I assert I was not attracted by the cash award of $50,000.00. But I have decided not to claim it for my own benefit. 

I plan to give the cash award to three entities: the first two are the foundations that I founded and organized to serve the interest of our poor, marginalized people. Both of them are independent, non-profit and non-partisan — Kilosbayan (People’s Action), a people’s organization and Bantay Katarungan (Sentinel of Justice), an NGO which harnesses the talents and idealism of qualified law students in the best law schools in Metro Manila, who monitor the performance of our Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals and the Anti-Graft Court and important quasi-judicial tribunals. These two foundations, especially Bantay Katarungan, are dependent on donations, which are dwindling. Kilosbayan Foundation which is well-known for its many activities nationwide, is in a similar financial predicament, despite the fact that since the beginning, the trustees of these two foundations, including myself, do not get any salary or allowance — we serve gratis et amore. 

The third is an educational institution in Dumaguete City — Silliman University — where my elder brother Benjamin Salonga, now deceased, finished in BS in Chemistry. He passed the Civil Service Examination and was employed in the Bureau of Science. I had been a self-supporting student during my years of basic law studies in the University of the Philippines, but my brother Ben supported me so I could devote more time to reach my senior year in law school and ultimately serve our weak, marginalized people who needed legal help. 

Thank you for the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and for the privilege of serving our poor, forgotten people. Salamat po.

It is a cruel fate anywhere to be blind, and all the more cruel in societies where sightless people are cursed as unlucky and shamed as useless burdens on their families and on society at large. KIM SUN-TAE, director of Seoul’s Siloam Eye Hospital, knows these degrading aspects of Korean society from bitter personal experience. He has devoted his life to changing them. 

KIM SUN-TAE was not born blind. For the first ten years of his life, he was the adored only son of a prosperous family. In June 1950, the violent outbreak of the Korean War suddenly rendered him an orphan. Not long afterwards, a mortar shell that he and other boys found while scavenging for food exploded and left him blind. Even his own relatives now treated him like a pariah and a slave. He ran away. Learning to survive as a beggar, KIM gathered strength from the random kindnesses of compassionate Koreans and American soldiers, and from Christian teachings he had imbibed in Sunday school. “God, please help me,” he prayed. 

KIM persevered and developed an iron will. From the hard life of the streets, he moved to the hard life of wartime orphanages and finally into school. He learned to read Korean Braille and to type. Vowing to become a Christian pastor, he became the first blind graduate of Seoul’s Soongsil High School and, in 1962, overcame the resistance of Korea’s military junta to enter Soongsil University. A master’s degree in theology followed in 1969, a doctorate in 1993. 

Meeting hardship with frugality, KIM struggled to form Korea’s first church for the blind in 1972. Its seven members worshipped in a borrowed room and a dilapidated apartment. The following year, the Korean Presbyterian Church named KIM director of Blind Evangelical Missions, a new department with a staff of one. He seized the opportunity to build a ministry for blind Christians, visiting church after church, publishing Braille bibles and hymnals, and launching a scholarship program for deserving students. He began to travel widely and, in Japan and the United States, witnessed public amenities and rehabilitation programs for the blind that enlarged his hopes for Korea. 

Increasingly, KIM devoted himself to the dream of a hospital dedicated to treating and curing blindness. Drawing support from Korea?s business community, in 1986 he led in founding Siloam Eye Hospital, where sight-restoring surgery and state-of-the-art facilities were available free to the needy. In 1996, Kim added a mobile clinic to deliver eye services to the rural poor, prison inmates, and other underserved communities. And, in 1997, he opened Korea’s largest rehabilitation-and-learning center to help blind and low-vision people cope with day-to-day life, learn new job skills, and become computer-literate using new Braille- and voice-friendly software. Meanwhile, KIM’s voice and esteemed example helped advance new laws requiring safe public spaces and employment for the disabled. 

Today, more than twenty thousand people have received free eye surgery and two hundred thousand more have been treated at Siloam Eye Hospital and its mobile unit. There are medical missions to Bangladesh, Kenya, China, and the Philippines. And nearly one thousand students have received scholarships through programs that KIM initiated. Moreover, the church for the blind that he founded thirty-five years ago now has its own sanctuary, four hundred members, and many vibrant offshoots and branches. 

As for his own role in all of this, Kim echoes the words of the Apostle Paul, “I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.” But Pastor KIM also has some words of his own. He says, “Blessed are those who never give up.” 

In electing KIM SUN-TAE to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service, the board of trustees recognizes his inspiring ministry of hope and practical assistance to his fellow blind and visually impaired citizens in South Korea.

To the distinguished chairman and trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, I feel truly honored that you have chosen to confer upon me this Award for Public Service, and I express my deepest gratitude. It brings me great happiness that my life’s work of helping my fellow blind brothers and sisters has been recognized in such an inspiring and dignified manner. 

First of all, I would like to give all glory and honor to God who has given me my calling, continually blessed me and made all things possible. 

Second, I would like to thank all the Christian ministers and believers for their unending prayers and support for the work of caring for the disabled and blind. 

Third, I express my gratitude to those who have been like my hands and feet-all the dedicated doctors, nurses, teachers and workers of the Siloam Eye Hospital and the Siloam Welfare Center for the Visually Impaired. 

Lastly, I would like to express my sincere thanks and recognize one who has been my eyes and a lifelong wellspring of love and support-my wife Jung-Ja. I humbly accept this Ramon Magsaysay Award with its great history and tradition-celebrated as the Nobel Prize of Asia-and am honored to be included among such esteemed men and women. More importantly I will cherish the spirit of this award and the philosophy it symbolizes deep in my heart. I will always strive to ease the suffering of my brothers and sisters in pain. I will continuously pray that my organization will be able to treat and improve the situation of the visually disabled not only in Korea but in all of Asia. 

I am planning to establish a new Siloam Eye Center in Seoul and open its doors to my visually handicapped brothers and sisters throughout Asia. In the spirit of Christ’s love I want to provide them with free eyesight recovery operations, medical treatment and preventive care. I would like to honor and commemorate the Ramon Magsaysay Award by dedicating the prize money of $50,000 to the building of the new Siloam Eye Center. 

It is a great privilege and honor to be able to meet all of you here today in the Philippines. I feel my connection to this country has been made long ago. In 1989 I sent a missionary to start a ministry for the blind in the Philippines and have been continually supporting this meaningful work by giving $3,000 every month. In addition, the religious organization I belong to has sent over 43 missionary families to serve and minister to the people of the Philippines. 

I pray that the recognition and honor those of you from the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation have bestowed upon us will blossom and return blessings to your organization and glorify the wonderful work that you do. Thank you and may the peace of Christ be with all of you.

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!

In the early twentieth century, the press was at the heart of India’s freedom struggle. During those formative years, says Indian reporter PALAGUMMI SAINATH, journalism contributed to “the liberation of the human being.” In contrast, he says, India’s press today merely performs “stenography” for big business and the governing elite. As the economy surges, matters that call for the urgent attention of the public and government are ignored in favor of film starlets and beauty queens, the stock market, and India’s famed IT boom. As a freelance journalist and rural affairs editor of The Hindu, SAINATH has taken a different path. Believing that ?journalism is for people, not for shareholders,? he has doggedly covered the lives of those who have been left behind.

Born in Chennai in 1957, SAINATH completed a master’s degree in history before turning to a life of journalism. At Blitz, a Mumbai tabloid, he rose to be deputy chief editor and became a popular columnist. In 1993, he changed course.

For the next few years, under a fellowship from The Times of India, SAINATH painstakingly investigated life in India’s ten poorest districts. In Everybody Loves a Good Drought, his bestselling book of 1997, and in hundreds of subsequent articles, SAINATH presented his readers with a world that belied the giddy accounts of India’s economic miracle. In this India, the harsh life of the rural poor was, in fact, growing harsher.

SAINATH discovered that the acute misery of India’s poorest districts was not caused by drought, as the government said. It was rooted in India’s enduring structural inequalities-in poverty, illiteracy, and caste discrimination — and exacerbated by recent economic reforms favoring foreign investment and privatization. Indeed, these sweeping changes combined with endemic corruption had led small farmers and landless laborers into evermore crippling debt-with devastating consequences.

SAINATH provided the evidence. He reported, for example, that the number of migrant-swollen buses leaving a single poor district for Mumbai each week had increased from one to thirty-four in less than ten years. He exposed the shocking rise in suicides among India’s debt-pressed farmers, revealing that in just six hard-hit districts in 2006 alone, the number of suicides had soared to well over a thousand. He revealed that at a time when officials boasted of a national grain surplus, 250 million Indians were suffering from endemic hunger, and that in districts where government storehouses were “stacked to the roof with food grain,” tribal children were starving to death.

SAINATH’s authoritative reporting led Indian authorities to address certain discrete abuses and to enhance relief efforts in states such as Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. But his deeper message also struck home. In 2000, nearly thirty of his articles were submitted as evidence at a national hearing on anti-dalit (untouchable) atrocities. In such ways, he has touched the conscience of the nation.

India’s press today, SAINATH says, is “creating audiences that have no interest in other human beings.” He is training a new breed of rural reporters with a different point of view. His journalism workshops occur directly in the villages, where he teaches young protégés to identify and write good stories and to be agents of change.

SAINATH finds hope in these young reporters and in the resilience and courage of the people he writes about-such as the legions of poor rural women in Tamil Nadu who have overcome taboos and learned to ride a bicycle. To advance freedom, even small freedoms such as this, is the most significant legacy of the early giants of Indian journalism to today’s reporters, he says. “I’m not ready to give up on my legacy yet.”

In electing PALAGUMMI SAINATH to receive the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India?s consciousness, moving the nation to action.

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

This is the 60th year of Indian independence. A freedom fought for and won on a vision that placed our humblest citizens at the centre of action and of the future. A struggle that brought the world’s then mightiest empire to its knees, which saw the birth of a new nation, with a populace overwhelmingly illiterate, yet aiming at building a democracy the world could be proud of. A people who, one freedom fighter predicted, would make the deaf hear and the blind see. They did.

Today, the generation of Indians who took part in that great struggle have mostly died out, though their achievements have not. The few who remain are in their late 80s or 90s. As one of them told me recently, “We fought to expel the colonial ruler, but not only for that. We fought for a just and honorable nation, for a good society.” I am now recording the lives of these last stalwarts of a generation I was not part of, but which I so deeply admire. A struggle that preceded my birth, but in which my own values are rooted. In their names, with those principles, and for their selflessness, I accept this great award.

In that battle for freedom, a tiny press played a mighty role. So vital did it become, that every national leader worth his or her salt, across the political spectrum, also doubled up as a journalist. Small and vulnerable as they were, the journalists of that time sought to give voice to the voiceless and speak for those who could not. Their rewards were banning, imprisonment, exile and worse. But they bequeathed to Indian journalism a legacy I am proud of and on behalf of which tradition, I accept this award today.

For the vision that generation stood for, the values it embodied, are no longer so secure. A nation founded on principles of egalitarianism embedded in its Constitution now witnesses the growth of inequality on a scale not seen since the days of the Colonial Raj. A nation that ranks fourth in the world’s list of dollar billionaires, ranks 126th in human development. A crisis in the countryside has seen agriculture-on which close to 60 per cent of the population depend-descend into the doldrums. It has seen rural employment crash. It has driven hundreds of thousands from villages towards towns and cities in search of jobs that are not there. It has pushed millions deeper into debt, and has seen over 112,000 farmers take their own lives in distress in a decade.

This time around, though, the response of a media politically free but chained by profit has not been anywhere as inspiring. Front pages and prime time are the turf of film stars, fashion shows and the entrenched privilege of the elite. Rural India, where the greatest battles of our freedom were fought, is pretty low down in the media?s priority list. There are, as always, exceptions. The paper I work for, The Hindu, has consistently given space to the chronicling of our greatest agrarian crisis since the eve of the Green Revolution. And across the country are countless journalists who, despite active discouragement from their managements, seek to place people above profit in their reporting, who try desperately to warn their audiences of what is going on at the bottom end of the spectrum and the dangers this involves. On behalf of all of them, I accept this award.

In nearly 14 years of reporting India’s villages fulltime, I have felt honoured and humbled by the generosity of some of the poorest people in the world. People who constantly bring home the Mahatma’s great line: “Live simply, that others might simply live.” But a people we today sideline and marginalise in the path of development we now pursue. A people in distress, even despair, who still manage to awe me with their human and humane values. On their behalf too, I accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award.