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This afternoon the Sixth Jose Rizal Awards for Excellence will be
given to outstanding Tsinoys. The awardees are all Filipinos of
Chinese descent who have proved themselves to be paragons of the
virtues of industriousness, acumen, devotion to duty, patriotism and
excellence in their personal and professional lives.
Also being awarded today for public service is
the Association of Philippine Fire Brigades, Inc., whose members are
largely Tsinoys.
The Jose Rizal Awards for Excellence is a joint
venture of The Manila Times and Kaisa para sa Kaunlaran Inc. The
awards ceremony will be held this afternoon at the Kaisa-Angelo King
Heritage Center on Anda and Cabildo streets in Intramuros, Manila.
Today’s awardees, like those in the first five
awarding ceremonies, are some of the most distinguished Filipinos.
They have been judged worthy of the awards not only for their
excellence as professionals, businessmen, and corporate leaders.
Their outstanding contributions to Philippine socio-economic,
scientific and cultural development and their activities as
contributors to the human development of the Filipinos as a people
have also been considered.
It is only in the JRAE and in no other venue
that Filipinos distinctly identified as Chinese-Filipinos, or
Tsinoys, are being recognized not just in the realm of business and
entrepreneurship but also as educators, artistic achievers, authors,
journalists, doctors, scientists, sportsmen and experts in the
different professional fields.
Dante Francis Ang II, this paper’s
President-CEO and Executive Editor, offered a profound insight in
the speech he gave in 2006 at the fifth awards ceremony:
“The Dr. Jose P. Rizal Awards for Excellence
can perhaps be better appreciated in light of what is happening in
our country today: That while masses of our countrymen leave these
shores for better lives abroad, we have a group that has been coming
to the Philippines for centuries, embracing our culture,
assimilating into our society, and putting an indelible stamp on our
national identity; and that amidst all the news and noise about the
lack of leadership at the local and national levels, we are blessed
with a quiet but hardworking people who could be role models for the
young today and for the generations to come.”
One of the motives behind the awards is to
expunge whatever feelings of racial discrimination some Filipinos
may still have against Tsinoys.
There is a constant need to remind ourselves
that not only Jose Rizal but practically every important player in
the revolution for independence from Spain—and later in the
Philippine-American War that we Filipinos fought to secure the First
Philippine Republic from the new American colonizer – were persons
of Chinese descent.
The Jose Rizal Awards for Excellence is one such
forceful reminder.
The underlying message of the Awards is that,
like Jose Rizal, we must love and serve our nation, which has grave
problems of poverty, corruption, inequality, injustice, disunity and
lack of patriotism.
Chinese-Filipinos are among the most patriotic
models of virtue that will rescue this nation from its problems.
From the very beginning they have been in the forefront of the
Philippine journey to nationhood. And they are in the forefront
now—in the more difficult journey of keeping the nation whole and
freeing the Filipino people from the problems that are holding them
back from prosperity and the leadership role in Asia they deserve to
have.
Together, Tsinoys and non-Tsinoys must work
together for the common good and the exaltation of the nation.
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