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

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 director of a major bank.

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 government-linked 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 now left his job at the bank to devote himself full-time to China's AIDS crisis.

Pondering how to help the children of Henan, 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 in four provinces are benefiting.

Chung To works cooperatively with the Chinese authorities and has found allies in international NGOs and foundations. Raising funds is his constant concern. His business background is useful here and shows in CHF's "six-step fund-raising strategy."

Otherwise, for now, forty-year-old Chung To has left the business world behind. "I figured that the world could do with one less banker," he says. "But these children, they cannot wait."

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.



CHEN GUANGCHENG

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 age seventeen, he entered a school for the blind and by 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 then set up a center for the 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. The case failed but 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. 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 held for months under house arrest 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 four-year prison term.

Chen's hope is in the rule of law. He is energizing the grass roots and, with many others, challenging Chinese 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 Magsayay 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.