Tang Xiyang

Who is Tang Xiyang?

Tang Xiyang is a Chinese environmentalist. He was awarded the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding.

Tang Xiyang graduated from Beijing Normal University and then worked as a journalist for a Beijing newspaper from 1952 - 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, Beijing Middle School No. 52 teacher Zheng Zhaonan, involved in factional struggles at her school, 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. Zheng Zhaonan's posthumously published letter explaining her political position became well known.

In passages censored from "A Green World Tour" Tang Xiyang discussed his experience of the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution during with Americans during his visit to the United States: