Asian of the Year

Asia News Network (ANN) magazine’s list for 2011 was a mix of those who made a difference positively and negatively in society. Regardless of their contribution—whether for the greater good or otherwise—their lives provided the public precious lessons. AsiaNews’ Asian of the Year was Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who was recognized for raising important issues in China to the general public through his art and blog at the risk of his own life.

Those who made it to the short list were India’s Anna Hazare, Thailand’s Yingluck Shinawatra, Burma’s Thein Sein, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, Bhutan’s Queen Jetsun Pema and Malaysia’s Tony Fernandes.

The magazine’s Asian Heroes were Japan’s Fukushima 50, who symbolized the faceless and nameless victims of the nuclear meltdown following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

On its blacklist were Cambodia’s Nuon Chea of the Khmer Rouge and former Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Their stories were a combination of triumph and downfall, of hope and despair.

ANN is a group of 21 newspapers, including the Philippine Daily Inquirer, in 18 countries.

Ai Weiwei

Provocateur

At 24, Ai Weiwei left China for New York to escape from his homeland’s repression.

At an early age, Ai knew of what may befall an individual going against China’s tight-fisted Communist Party. His father, Ai Qing, was a poet who was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement and sent to a labor camp in Xinjiang.

So the young Ai stayed in New York starting 1981. For 12 years, he slowly established himself among a few prominent contemporary Asian artists in the West.

In 1993, he returned home to pay his last respects to his sick father. Back in his homeland, Ai’s art started to take root and he helped establish the Beijing East Village for experimental artists. He was interested in design and eventually put up the Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd.

This was the company that got him into trouble early in 2011 when the Chinese government accused him of evading the payment of taxes worth 15 million yuan (US$2.4 million).

Ai was detained for 81 days and was not allowed to see his family or talk to lawyers. His supporters, meanwhile, offered help, some clipping money on the walls of his studio in the north of Beijing.

Protests seeking Ai’s release soon followed: on China’s streets, art museums in Europe and the United States, and in the social media network.

The Internet and social media have in fact become Ai’s platform in expressing himself even though he was not familiar with the technology when he first started as a blogger. But over time, he started to post provocative messages.

In 2008, he investigated the Sichuan earthquake that killed more than 69,000 people. He solicited information from netizens on the names and number of schoolchildren who died in the disaster. His investigation provoked the authorities and his blog was shut down. That was when he turned to Twitter. He earned more than 117,000 followers in a year and a half. He tweeted in Mandarin and in an interview with Time, he noted that social media had changed the political landscape and had given a voice to ordinary people.

In one of his tweets, Ai said: “When you’re in the middle of summer, you don’t know whether it’s winter.” Like Ai’s art, he has turned his tweets into provocative poetry.

At the moment, Ai is prevented from leaving China. But he prefers to stay in his homeland because he feels that’s the least he can do for those who have supported not only his art, but also his cause. Phatarawadee Phataranawik, The Nation

Anna Hazare

India’s anticorruption activist

In late November, Sharad Pawar, India’s minister for agriculture, was slapped in the face by an angry man who had posed as a journalist to gain access to him.

Harvinder Singh, who was sent to jail a day later, said he was annoyed by the uncontrolled rise in food prices.

When news reached the antigraft activist Anna Hazare in his home village his reaction was rather unexpected for someone widely regarded as a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence. “Just one slap?” he inquired.

A national uproar followed those remarks and Hazare initially backtracked. But two weeks later, he appeared to justify the incident. “For the betterment of society,” he said, “I do not consider this violence wrong.”

Through 2011 in India, no one dominated the headlines so much as the 74-year-old Hazare, the former army driver and social reformist who launched a crusade on corruption by calling for a strong national Ombudsman with wide powers to investigate graft and order prosecution.

Hazare wants the prime minister under the purview of the Lokpal, or Ombudsman, and the Central Bureau of Investigation to take its orders from this office, not the government of the day.

In August, a two weeklong fast enthralled the nation, with India’s frenetic electronic media giving him minute-by-minute coverage.

Parliament was forced to have a special Saturday session to pass a “sense of the house resolution” that seemed to accede to most of Hazare’s demands. Last month, the CNN-IBN news channel named him Indian of the Year 2011.

Hazare has told his story  many times. During the 1965 war with Pakistan, he said, his entire platoon was wiped out save for himself, who escaped with shrapnel injuries. It was an epiphanic moment and from that time on he vowed to live and die for “Mother India.”

Returning to his village in the western state of Maharashtra, Hazare, who never married and lives in a Hindu temple with few belongings other than his clothes and a tin plate off which he eats, began a program of social uplift.

In a couple of decades, the village of Ralegan Siddhi changed immeasurably. From a single-crop village, there are now two crops, partly because of a program to recharge groundwater. Literacy trebled. Drunks and hooch-sellers vanished. Such results soon gave Hazare a massive standing in the state.

“I have claimed six wickets,” Hazare said recently, using a cricket term to describe the number of corrupt politicians he had ousted.

What Hazare achieved, to a degree, was to use his provincial performance on  the national stage, helped by an obliging media and a nation desperately looking for an unimpeachable hero after a series of scandals exposed India’s political class as hugely corrupt and conniving. Hazare, in his homespun cotton clothes and Gandhi cap, fitted the bill.

The Man from Maharashtra obliged in August, after bumbling authorities briefly arrested him to prevent his fast. Hazare’s first act upon his release was to drive to the mausoleum of Mahatma Gandhi, where he outpaced the policemen chasing him as they tried to stop his dash to the shrine-like memorial. For the next few hours he held court there and the next morning’s headlines appeared above photographs showing him kneeling reverentially at the shrine. Ravi Velloor, The Straits Times

Thein Sein

Reformist or lackey?

Some analysts compare Burmese President Thein Sein to former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev for introducing the Burmese version of perestroika and glasnost (reconstruction and openness) to the military-dominated country. But many others doubt whether he is a real reformer. Thein Sein has made a series of surprise moves since he took the helm in March by implementing political and economic reforms.

He met Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, allowed her a certain degree of freedom and even listened to her concerns over development projects that may damage the environment.

He announced a ceasefire with armed ethnic minorities that have been fighting with the government for decades. Many groups have reached a truce while many others are in the process of negotiations.

He relaxed some economic restrictions and showed intention to solve the most difficult issue of the Kyat currency. On top of it, he also eased restrictions on the media. For instance, articles and pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi are already allowed in local media and interviews with the opposition leader are permitted. Web pages of many media organizations that were once banned are now accessible, too.

Thein Sein, 66, is not a new face in Burma’s politics but he never had the reputation of being a reformist. Most people knew him earlier as a follower of the junta’s paramount leader, Than Shwe.

He trained under the Defense Services Academy where he graduated in 1968 but he has no record of being a combat soldier. Throughout his military career, he was a bureaucrat, rather than a tough field commander. Supalak Ganjanakhundee, The Nation

Fukushima 50

Japan’s faceless heroes

Battling fatigue and hunger, engineers, scientists and emergency personnel of Fukushima and an army of volunteers refused to abandon their work to save millions of lives from a tragedy that brought the world on the brink of a nuclear disaster.

These faceless, nameless men and women in airtight radioactive suits were called the “Fukushima 50,” representing hundreds of workers now esteemed as Japan’s heroes—a team of brave people who believed in self-sacrifice to stave off further disaster in a country wrecked by a massive earthquake and tsunami that struck its northeastern coast.

Japan’s largest in history, the 9-magnitude earthquake unleashed a tsunami that claimed the lives of close to 16,000 people on March 11, 2011. More than 3,800 were missing.

The Fukushima plant lost power right after. Safety systems failed and caused a series of explosions, damaging six nuclear reactors. With no power to keep the fuel rods cool which, when too hot, could explode and lead to a nuclear meltdown, the workers worked overtime to pump water into the storage pools and keep the situation under control.

Clad in suits that barely offered protection from radioactive elements, they all toiled quietly despite the risk of putting their lives on the line. They prepared not only for death, but also for the threat of radiation-related diseases that could happen later in life.

One of the volunteers, a retired Japanese worker for an electric company, needed to explain to his daughter that the future of Fukushima rested on them. “I feel it’s my mission to help,” he told BBC. Asia News Network