China Digital Instances (CDT) is being honored with the 2025 Democracy Award for its unwavering dedication to documenting the Chinese language individuals’s wrestle for fact and freedom within the face of the Chinese language Communist Occasion’s huge censorship equipment. Based in 2003, CDT is the world’s foremost supply exposing how Chinese language residents problem and circumvent authoritarian management on-line. By way of meticulous archiving and translation of censored supplies, CDT preserves a dwelling file of the Chinese language individuals’s voices—voices the regime strives to erase. Its work ensures that fact endures, even underneath one of many world’s most refined techniques of repression.
CDT’s founder and editor-in-chief, Xiao Qiang, accepts the award on the group’s behalf. A theoretical physicist by coaching, Xiao turned a full-time human rights advocate following the Tiananmen Bloodbath in 1989. Since then, he has spent greater than three a long time exposing censorship and repression in China, combining cutting-edge digital analysis with deep ethical conviction. By way of his management at CDT, Xiao has amplified voices the regime seeks to silence and has constructed a permanent platform that empowers others to problem authoritarian management with fact and transparency.
The Democracy Award, introduced yearly by NED’s Board of Administrators, acknowledges the brave work of people and organizations which have superior human rights and democracy around the globe. The award itself is a reproduction of the Goddess of Democracy statue raised by college students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Sq. in 1989—an emblem of the common aspiration for freedom. Whereas the statue was destroyed, its picture endures as a reminder that the human spirit can’t be silenced.
Remarks by Xiao Qiang upon accepting the 2025 Democracy Award for China Digital Instances:
I’m deeply honored to simply accept this award on behalf of the China Digital Instances staff—previous and current—and the numerous netizens contained in the Nice Firewall whose braveness to talk, doc, and share fact retains the sunshine of freedom alive. Their quiet defiance is the ethical basis of our work.
I additionally need to acknowledge my co-awardee, Rushan Abbas, and the Marketing campaign for Uyghurs. Our paths converge in the identical important wrestle—to defend human dignity towards techniques of repression and forgetting. My deepest gratitude goes to the Nationwide Endowment for Democracy for recognizing not simply our work, however the spirit behind it: the conviction that fact issues, and that each voice counts.
At CDT, our mission is to talk fact to energy—not with hatred, however with readability and braveness—and to protect collective reminiscence as historical past. In China’s digital darkness, phrases, pictures, and testimonies are continually erased. But every act of remembrance, every shared fragment of actuality, turns into a part of a collective reminiscence that no censorship can destroy. It’s by means of reminiscence that a individuals reclaim their humanity.
As synthetic intelligence transforms our world, we face a defining problem. Info management is the core of authoritarian stability—the Nice Firewall’s very situation of survival.
Democracy, in distinction, relies on openness. Underneath authoritarianism, AI serves management, surveillance and manipulation; underneath democracy, it should develop human freedom and ethical creativeness. The way forward for AI will take a look at not solely our applied sciences, however our values—and finally, our humanity.
Freedom begins with fact—and fact, when preserved in collective reminiscence, turns into the seed of a freer future. Thanks.
