In 1985, China’s then leader Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) was named by Time Magazine as the “Man of the Year”. Almost two decades later, in a land transformed by reforms Deng set in motion, it has become fashionable for China’s news media to name their own persons of the year. Who are the most notable Chinese figures? In December 2002, Sina.com (新浪网), one of China’s most popular portals and internet companies, and the Southern Weekend 《南方周末》, an influential paper known for its lively and sophisticated reporting, jointly conducted a poll of their readers to select the “2002 Person of the Year” (2002年度人物). Their goal was to select “those in the news who, in the preceding year, have or will have made an important and long-lasting impact on China and the lives of the Chinese people”. (Southern Weekend, December 26, 2002) Choosing from a list of several dozen nominees, readers gave the following ten Chinese men and women the most votes (in alphabetical order):

Chen Peide (陈培德), a provincial sports official who was the first to blow the whistle on the dark side of Chinese sports: referee bribery.

Liu Shuwei (刘姝威), an economist whose 600-word article questioning the financial statements of a listed Chinese company led to its demise and highlighted the problem of widespread accounting fraud among Chinese public companies.

Lü Jingyi (吕净一), a low-level government official who fought for five years to bring down his corrupt superior. Lü’s courage came at a heavy price: in an attack suspected of being a murder-for-hire ordered by the corrupt official, Lü was permanently disabled and his wife killed.

Lü Rizhou (吕日周), a municipal Communist Party chief whose bold and unorthodox political experiment in one of China’s poorest cities generated much controversy and turned him into a media sensation.

Mao Yushi (茅于轼), a well-known economist who founded arguably China’s most influential independent think-tank, the Unirule Institute of Economics (天则经济研究所). For almost a decade, Mr. Mao has also run a private foundation that has provided micro-credit financing to peasants in one of China’s most impoverished regions.

Sir Run Run Shaw (邵逸夫), a Hong Kong movie tycoon and philanthropist who founded the Shaw Prize in November 2002. Dubbed by the Chinese media as the “Nobel Prize of the East”, the annual Shaw Prize will give out three awards (at one million dollars each) to outstanding scientists in the areas of astronomy, life sciences and medicine, and mathematics.

Yao Ming (姚明), the 7’ tall Chinese basketball sensation whose NBA superstardom has made him the pride of the nation.

Zhang Baichuan (张百川), an AIDS researcher and gay rights activist who has waged a lonely battle to bring the nation’s attention to AIDS prevention and education among China’s gay population.

Zhang Weixing (张卫星), a stock analyst whose critical analysis of the fundamental problems of China’s stock market won him a huge following among individual investors in China.

The winner of the 2002 Person of the Year award was Ms. Wang Xuan (王选), a woman who had been leading a seven-year legal crusade on behalf of victims of Japan’s World War II biological warfare in China.

Sina.com initially announced the results of the poll at the end of December 2002 but thereafter quickly removed the poll results from its website. According to reports outside China, Sina.com was pressured to do so because some of the nominees had not been blessed by the government. The poll results cited in this article come from the December 26, 2002 issue of the Southern Weekend.

2002 Person of the Year. The selection of Ms. Wang Xuan underscores a rising patriotic sentiment in China. Many of the more than 500 postings on Sina.com’s bulletin board system (BBS) devoted to the poll expressed admiration for Ms. Wang as a “national hero”. Ms. Wang came from a small town in China’s Zhejiang Province (浙江省), once the site of Japan’s biological warfare experiments during World War II. Several of her family members, including an uncle, were victims of such experiments. In 1997, Ms. Wang led a group of 180 victims and families from her home town in filing a lawsuit in Tokyo against the Japanese government. Wang’s group demanded that the Japanese government not only admit the war crimes, but also apologize and pay compensation to the victims and their families. They argued that although the Chinese government had agreed not to seek compensation for Japan’s war crimes during World War II, Chinese victims and their families should not be barred from private actions seeking compensation. Since then, Ms. Wang devoted herself full time to collecting evidence, bringing witnesses to trial and touring China and Japan to rally support. She had also spent thousands of dollars of personal funds on her cause. Her motivation: a sense of obligation to her people and a desire to “give voice to many voiceless and faceless victims”. (China Youth Online 中靑在线, September 5, 2002) In July 2002, a Tokyo trial court rejected the Chinese plaintiffs’ claims on the grounds that there had been insufficient precedents in international law to support war crime victims’ claims against the government of the offending country and that the issue of the Japanese government’s liability had been resolved through a bilateral treaty between China and Japan. The case is now on appeal. Ms. Wang’s grassroots effort was widely reported in the Chinese press (e.g. see reports by China Youth Daily 《中国青年报》 and Xinhua Net 新华网). The BBC also aired a lengthy interview about her campaign in February 2002.

Ms. Wang’s popularity may also be a reflection of the public’s dissatisfaction with the general lack of support from the Chinese government on behalf of the victims, and in particular with the fact that China had agreed in 1979 not to seek compensation for Japan’s war crimes. As one Chinese commentator wrote, “Why are we forgetting the Japanese atrocities? Why are most people in the world unaware that the crimes committed by the Japanese during their invasion of China were no less heinous than those of the Nazis? ... One reason is that Jiang Jieshi [Chiang Kai-Shek] (蒋介石) gave up our rights to seek compensation from the Japanese government and the Chinese government had to follow suit thereafter. … Without Wang Xuan leading her grassroots campaign to seek compensation from Japan, to expose Japanese invaders’ atrocities and to uphold justice, the world and our future generations would never know the plight and humiliation suffered by us Chinese.” (China Economic Times 《中国经济时报》, January 3, 2003)

Interestingly, a Chinese man who was found guilty in Japan for defacing the Yasukuni Shrine was voted Sina.com and the Southern Weekend’s 2001 Person of the Year. The internationally controversial Yasukuni Shrine is Japan’s memorial for its 2.5 million war heroes. Among those honored are convicted World War II criminals.

Other Nominees. Several other nominees are also worth noting, among them:

Liu Shuwei (刘姝威). Ms. Liu, a researcher at the Central University of Finance and Economics (中央财经大学) in Beijing, set off a firestorm with a 600-word report in October 2001 questioning the financial viability of Lantian Co. Ltd. (蓝田股份有限公司), a well-known publicly-listed company. Lantian had been a rising star on the Shanghai Stock Exchange: its annual net profits increased nearly ten times during the first three years following its initial public offering in 1996. (China Economic Times, October 10, 2002) Ms. Liu discovered the company’s perilous financial state in 2001 while doing research for her book on the subject of fraudulent accounting practices among China’s listed companies. After reviewing Lantian’s audited financial statements, she concluded that Lantian had almost no cash flow and was kept afloat entirely on bank loans. Ms. Liu submitted her findings to the Financial Internal Reference News 《金融内参》, a confidential publication for China’s top banking regulators and bank officials. Within days after her article was published, most of Lantian’s creditors, which included China’s largest state-owned banks, stopped extending further loans to the company. They later sued to recover more than RMB2 billion ($241 million) of debt from Lantian. Lantian denied that it was in any financial trouble, going so far as to sue Ms. Liu for defamation. But it could not hide the obvious. In 2002, Lantian’s chairman of the board and several of its top officials were arrested on charges of accounting fraud; trading of company’s stock was suspended; and the China Securities and Exchange Commission (中国证监会) launched an investigation into the company’s financial reporting practices.

Ms. Liu’s story shone the spotlight on one of the worrisome aspects facing China’s banking industry: mounting bad debt as a result of the collusive dealings between corporate borrowers and officials at state-owned banks, many of whom were certainly aware of this problem. Ms. Liu was the only one who dared say that the “emperor had no clothes”. In an interview with China’s central television station, CCTV, Ms. Liu said, “I was shocked [by the numbers]. I personally have not been to Lantian but I am able to see so many obvious red flags. The simplest and the most basic analysis should have revealed the truth. Why hasn’t anyone else said anything? … It is impossible that the banks were incapable of discovering such an obvious problem. Then why did the banks continue to lend money that they shouldn’t have loaned in the first place and why did they not stop extending new loans? I think it is due to factors other than technical competence… factors which shouldn’t exist in a healthy market economy”. Ms. Liu declined to further elaborate on these “factors”. However, according to a report published in the Financial Times 《财经时报》 on August 20, 2002, five loan officers at the Bank of Communications (交通银行) took RMB4.6 million (US$554,200) in bribes in connection with its RMB100 million ($12.05 million) loan to Lantian. The report speculated that such practices were widespread among Lantian’s creditors.

Liu’s story also made individual investors feel more vulnerable in China’s stock market, which has been plagued by speculation, manipulation and lack of transparency since its inception in the early 90s. In an online discussion hosted by the Beijing Youth Daily 《北京青年报》 on April 28, 2002, many investors asked Ms. Liu how they could protect themselves from another Lantian. Her advice? “The ability to understand financial statements is a prerequisite for investors. … Otherwise investing in the stock market is risky business”. Ms. Liu herself did not own any stocks in listed Chinese companies.

Zhang Baichuan (张百川). Dr. Zhang is a leading AIDS researcher and a gay rights activist—a rare species in China. In 2001, Dr. Zhang became the first Chinese to receive the internationally-prestigious Berry & Martin Prize for his “significant contribution to AIDS education and prevention” in China. According to Dr. Zhang, there are an estimated 18 million gay men in China and based on a study in 2001, approximately 4-5% of the gay men in Beijing are HIV-positive. (Sina.com/view 《新浪观察》, September 24, 2002) For more than ten years, Dr. Zhang has openly reached out to China’s largely underground gay community to educate them about AIDS. His bi-monthly publication, “Friends Exchange” 《朋友通讯》, carries his message about AIDS to tens of thousands of Chinese gay men. According to the publication’s own survey, nearly 60% of its 70,000 readers became more aware of the danger of AIDS and 20% started using condoms. (China Newsweek 《新闻周刊》, November 1, 2001) Despite the significance of his work, Dr. Zhang is largely fighting a lonely and uphill battle. Homosexuality remains taboo in China. Until 2001, the Chinese medical establishment still classified homosexuality as a “sexual deviance”. While the government acknowledged in 2002 that one million Chinese were infected with AIDS, there have been no government-sponsored education or intervention programs targeted at the gay population. The Southern Weekend reported on November 30, 2001 that homosexuals were not included in the 150 nationwide AIDS focus groups. Although Dr. Zhang’s work is officially sanctioned, his only funding has come from the Ford Foundation, a private U.S. foundation. Since the beginning of his work on AIDS, Dr. Zhang, a trained dermatologist, has lost the privilege of seeing patients in his own hospital. The hospital also refused to let him work in its main building for fear of associating with “homosexuals and prostitutes”. Reflecting on his predicament, Dr. Zhang lamented, “as soon as researchers of a marginalized population are themselves being marginalized, we have lost our hope of controlling the AIDS epidemic.” (Southern Weekend, April 18, 2002)

Dr. Zhang’s efforts are not lost on China’s gay community. In Sina.com’s poll for the 2002 Person of the Year, gays were unusually vocal in their support for Dr. Zhang. A number of Chinese gay websites called on members of the gay community to vote for Zhang. The Sina.com bulletin board system (BBS) was so crowded with postings from gay men that some even complained that the results could be skewed by the gay votes. Dr. Zhang received over 40,000 votes from Sina.com readers.

Lü Rizhou (吕日周). Mr. Lü was the top Communist Party leader of Changzhi, Shanxi Province (山西省长治市), one of China’s poorest cities. Mr. Lü’s bold and unorthodox measures to clean up his local government attracted both promise and controversy. According to reports by the Southern Weekend and the China Youth Daily, during his three-year tenure in Changzhi, Mr. Lü forced local officials to be more truthful by “squeezing water” out of their statistics; he hosted hundreds of town meetings to air citizen complaints; and he made anyone who spit in public don a yellow vest bearing the sign “I behaved in an uncivilized manner”. Lü also did something that no other reformer in China ever tried: using the media to take on the government establishment and carry out his reform agenda. On his orders, the official Party newspaper Changzhi Daily 《长治日报》 and other city newspapers named top city officials who slept through meetings, published internal working reports by government officials (complete with Lü’s harsh comments), and even carried Lü’s directives to lower level officials. It was reported that during Lü’s tenure, Changzhi officials from top to bottom anxiously scanned the Changzhi Daily each morning to see if they were named in the paper. Hundreds of Changzhi officials, including the Vice Mayor, were singled out for criticism in the city papers and 160 of them were removed for misconduct. Mr. Lü’s daring reform tactics generated much controversy beyond Changzhi and turned him into a national media sensation. Some accused him of being publicity hungry. Others questioned his heavy-handed top-down management style and referred to him as a “benign dictator”. Many wondered how long he would last and what would happen to Changzhi if he left. After interviewing Mr. Lü several times, a Southern Weekend reporter wrote, “This is a tough experiment. It looks as if [he is] trying to move a mountain all by himself. What will the end result be? Will he move the mountain or will he be crushed to pieces? …The verdict is still out”. (Sources: Southern Weekend, October 18, 2002 and China Youth Daily, October 26, 2002)

The verdict came in January 2003. Mr. Lü was moved from his Changzhi post to become Vice Chairman of the Shanxi Province People’s Political Consultative Conference (山西省政协副主席), a largely symbolic government advisory body consisted of retired officials and personages. Although technically a promotion, this change removed Lü from the center of his reform experiment. Thousands in Changzhi turned out to bid him farewell. Many of Lü’s former subordinates, however, let out a sigh of relief (China Newsweek 《新闻周刊》, January 28, 2003).