Chinese journalist Hu Shuli and lawyer Wang Canfa win Magsaysay award

An influential journalist and a crusading environmental lawyer from China are among this year’s winners of Asia’s Magsaysay awards, the organisers announced on Thursday.

The Manila-based Ramon Magsaysay Award, named after a Filipino president who was killed in a plane crash, was established in 1957 to honour people or groups who change communities for the better and is often described as Asia’s Nobel Prize.

Among this year’s six awardees is Hu Shuli, 61, founder and editor of Caijing, a business magazine famed for its groundbreaking investigative reporting that has had a profound impact on China.

Its reports on illegal trading, “government cover-up of the true extent of the 2003 Sars epidemic”, and corporate fraud led to the ousting of high public officials, prosecution of business leaders, and stock market reforms, the foundation said.

“Hers is a journalism that works within the system but preserves the critical distance that is journalism’s strength,” the award citation said of Hu.

Another winner was Chinese lawyer Wang Canfa, 55, founder of the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, which has handled thousands of environmental complaints and beaten powerful industrialists in court.

Its efforts have also included training lawyers and judges, as well as drafting environmental laws and regulations, the foundation said.