Tang Xiyang
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tang Xiyang (唐錫陽; 30 January 1930 – 3 November 2022) was a Chinese environmentalist. He was awarded the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding.[1]
Tang Xiyang was born in Miluo, Hunan Province on 30 January 1930. He graduated from Beijing Normal University and then worked as a journalist for a Beijing newspaper from 1952 to 1957. Condemned as a rightist in 1957, Tang was forced to work in factories and on farms in the Beijing area until his rehabilitation in 1979. During the Cultural Revolution, his first wife, Zheng Zhaonan (郑兆南), struggled at her school because she was beaten severely, humiliated and cruelly mistreated for 47 days by the middle school's Red Guards for being anti-Party and counter-revolutionary as a result. She was refused medical care and died of her injuries. Her refusal to denounce her husband Tang Xiyang as a rightist, and her landlord family background were likely important reasons for the ferocity of the attacks on her.[2] Zheng Zhaonan's posthumously published letter explaining her political position became well known.[3][4][5][6]
Tang died on 3 November 2022, at the age of 92.[7]
Book
In 1980 he founded Great Nature magazine,[8] and later he wrote the book A Green World Tour, which has become important for China's younger environmentalists. Tang met his second wife, Marsha Marks of New York, in 1981 and began a long collaboration which ended with her death in July 1996.[9]
A Green World Tour[10] was published in English translation in 1999. In some of the passages, Tang Xiyang discussed his experience of the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution with Americans during his visit to the United States:[11]
Tang believed that Chinese shortcomings in the areas of human rights and democracy are among the most important causes not only of human tragedy but also environmental devastation. A Green World Tour does not touch often on political topics, but these portions were heavily censored.
