The Executive Yuan presented Bo Yang (柏楊), the 83-year-old human-rights activist and writer, with the Executive Yuan Cultural Award last Friday for his lifetime achievement as an advocate for human rights in the face of the KMT's totalitarian rule.
The Cabinet's cultural award, the highest honor for cultural contributions, was bestowed on Bo Yang -- who had been put behind bars for almost 10 years for writing scathing commentaries about the ruling KMT -- to recognize his continuous efforts as a long-term social critic.
Premier Yu Shyi-kun, who presided over the award ceremony, said, "In a time that didn't allow any critical voices, Bo Yang was viewed as the quintessential dissident, but his name is also a symbol of wisdom, conscience and bravery.
TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
"His satirical essays are acute, pointing out the dark sides of society and speaking the unspeakable," Yu said.
Yu also praised Bo Yang's new translation of the classical Chinese historical records of Zi-zhi Tong-jian (
The premier said he benefited a lot from the book.
Zi-zhi Tong-jian chronicled the Chinese dynasties from 403BC to AD959, after the works were compiled by the Chinese politician Si-ma Guang (司馬光), who lived from 1019 to 1086.
Bo Yang's edition of the chronicles was finished during his prison term on Green Island, a place well known for its facilities for political dissidents during the white terror era from 1949 to 1987.
Bo Yang said at the ceremony, "It is honesty that keeps me moving forward."
"I am simply an honest writer and offer my advice to the leaders of the nation, hoping to better safeguard justice and administration," he said.
He compared himself to an early rising caterpillar that was eaten up by the early bird -- an authoritarian government that allows no words of opposition.
"While I thought that I could do something to help the country and strive for freedom of the press by disclosing the dark sides of society, I made a big mistake ... the country that I love arrested me and I faced the death penalty," Bo Yang said.
"Thanks to my friends abroad who made persistent efforts to rescue me, I narrowly escaped death and was eventually incarcerated in prison," Bo Yang said.
"When in prison, I remembered that farmers outside would say to their friends that the people inside prison were a bunch of naive people, who dared to dream about democracy."
"But it is because of our insistence on this ideal that motivated me to move forward," he said.
Bo Yang said the first transfer of political power from the KMT to DPP in 2000 was an unprecedented experience and he described the advent of democracy as a bird spitting out all the caterpillars it had swallowed.
"However, some of those caterpillars have been executed, or died in a cell, or were kept in the psychiatric house ... and I am just among the lucky few that are still alive," he said.
Bo Yang said he hoped the younger generation never experiences the pain he suffered and will establish a nation that upholds human rights and respects human dignity.
"This is the work I have been pushing through for the past two decades, and I believe that one day it will bear fruit," he said.
Originally named Kuo Yi-dong (
In the 1960s, Bo Yang wrote a series of essays for newspapers.
But for his translations of an English-language comic in 1967, which was seen by Chiang Kai-shek's (蔣介石) government as an insulting portrayal of the KMT generalissimo, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Bo Yang has produced more than 100 books -- including essays, novels, history and poetry -- since the beginning of his writing career in the 1950s.
One of Bo Yang's most famous books, The Ugly Chinaman (醜陋的中國人) -- in which he introduces the Chinese "soy-vat culture" -- describes the stagnation process of the vat and compares the fermentation to centuries of stagnation that went on in Chinese society. In the book, Bo Yang admonishes Chinese for imitating the past rather than looking toward the future.
The book, a collection of lectures and essays focusing on the conflict between traditional Chinese culture and the values of an industrialized West, created a furious debate in Chinese communities throughout the world.
Premier Yu said that Bo Yang's insight of the "soy-vat culture" points out the long-standing bad practices of an entrenched Chinese culture and offers modern Chinese an opportunity to re-examine the nature of their society.
Bo Yang's latest work, To Live with Respect and Dignity (
The premier said "respect" and "dignity" are two important factors which could improve Taiwan and that the two concepts are essential to cross-strait interaction.
Bo Yang's experience as a political prisoner has made him a long-time human-rights advocate. And his efforts in that direction produced results in 1999 when the first human-rights monument in Asia was officially inaugurated on Green Island. The monument, which stands near the beach, is inscribed with a poem by Bo Yang.
Bo Yang is an adviser to President Chen Shui-bian (
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