News and Notes
- News and Notes
NED Honors Taiwan’s President Lee
On April 16, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) honored recently reelected Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui at a reception on Capitol Hill. Co-sponsoring the event were Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska), Rep. Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.), and Rep. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.). A tribute to President Lee was read by Paula Dobriansky, vice-chairman of NED’s Board of Directors, who praised him as “the central figure and driving force behind [Taiwan’s] remarkable political transformation” and lauded his wisdom in understanding “the need to integrate the two competing camps of contemporary Chinese political thought: the Confucianists and the advocates of Westernization.”
There were more than 400 people in attendance, including 34 members of Congress. Among those who spoke were 7 U.S. senators and 12 members of the House of Representatives, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and House committee chairmen Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.), Bob Livingston (R-La.), and Gerald B.H. Solomon.
On behalf of President Lee, Taiwan’s representative in the U.S., Benjamin Lu, accepted the Endowment’s gift of an embossed, four-volume set of the Encyclopedia of Democracy as a token of NED’s esteem for Lee’s contributions to the cause of free government.
Hong Kong Legislator Awarded Freedom Prize
On March 17, the executive committee of the Liberal International announced that Martin C.M. Lee, chairman of the Democratic Party (DP) and a leading member of the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, had been awarded its 1996 Prize for Freedom. The prize, awarded annually to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the cause of freedom in the world, was presented at the Liberal International Congress [End Page 186] held at Noordwijk, the Netherlands, on June 5–8.
Lee has been a staunch advocate of democratic reform in Hong Kong, calling for a system of government that respects individual freedom, human rights, justice, and the rule of law.
Prior to the award ceremony, Liberal International president Da- vid Steel expressed outrage that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had excluded DP members from the committee charged with overseeing Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese control in 1997. The DP captured more seats than any other party in the September 1995 elections for Hong Kong’s 60-member Legislative Council.
On accepting the award, Lee praised Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng and other political prisoners in the PRC who have risked their lives in the name of democracy.
Steel also noted that Burmese authorities continued to deny him permission to enter their country to present last year’s Liberal International Freedom Prize to opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma has told Steel that his visit was “not convenient.”
The Meaning of Modern Revolutions
On May 17–19, the University of Chicago’s John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy hosted a conference on “The Meaning of Modern Revolutions.” The conference sought to examine the development of the idea of revolution with the objective of arriving at a clearer understanding of the nature of the momentous political changes of 1989–91, and their implications for the future of revolution.
The conference opened with a theoretical session featuring papers by Nathan Tarcov on the ancient understanding of revolution and Pierre Hassner on the modern understanding. There followed four sessions devoted, respectively, to the English Revolutions (J.C.D. Clark and Mark Kishlansky); the American Revolution (Paul Rahe and Gordon Wood); the French Revolution (Keith Baker and François Furet); and the Russian Revolution (Abraham Ascher and Martin Malia).
The concluding session, featuring papers by Francis Fukuyama and Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., focused on the collapse of European communism and the future of revolution. The participants differed in their views as to whether the Soviet collapse was really a revolution, a restoration, or something else, but there was surprising agreement that the idea of revolution has now been thoroughly discredited.
On the evening before the conference, radio station WBEZ and the University of Chicago hosted “The Future of Revolution: Anti-Democratic and Democratic...
