Interview with Dr. Lau Kin Chi: 1000 Women for the Nobel
              Peace Prize 2005 (by Monique Woolnough)

1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 is a project that seeks to bring attention to the work of millions of women around the world to promote peace. Only 12 women have been recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize since it was first awarded in 1901. 999 women were selected from over 150 countries, ranging in age from their twenties to their eighties. Farmers, teachers, artists, politicians, unknown and known, these women are all working non-violently toward a sustainable and holistic peace. The thousandth woman could be you, a friend, or someone you have encountered, and this prompts us to think about the women in our lives who are working towards peace. A book, 1000 Women Across the Globe has been published containing pictures and stories of the 999 women and a photo exhibit is currently making its way around the world.

Dr. Lau Kin Chi teaches comparative literature, critical pedagogy, global culture, local governance, and negotiating violence at the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University in Hong Kong, China. She is a founding member of China Social Services and Development Research Centre (CSD), a voluntary group, engaged in development research and community building projects in China. She has written on modernization, rural reconstruction, resurgent patriarchy and alternatives in practice in China. She is the regional coordinator of the 1000 Women for Peace campaign for China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Macau and Hong Kong.

Monique Woolnough is a third year student in International Development at the University of Guelph who is currently on exchange at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. She recently attended the "1000 Peace Women Across the Globe Photo Exhibition".

MW: What is the significance of choosing 1000 women, many unknown, to be nominated as a collective for the Nobel Peace Prize, which has in the past only been awarded to individuals or organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières?

LKC: Well we were trying to go right at the mainstream ideas of all this masculine elitism, but of course, the whole idea of 1000 women is a very symbolic one. So it's very difficult for people to really understand what it is about, so, it's a whole process of persuading people what the project is about and have a rethink about the idea. The interesting thing about this project is that it's not only an idea, we are not asking the Nobel Peace Prize, "well award the prize to all women". Well [laughs] that is basically what we were trying to say, we want the prize to go to women, especially to grassroots women to pay tribute to their work. I think the interesting part is that we are presenting 1000 women, as individuals who have done very specific work in their communities, and we are doing the documentation and presenting the book. As Dai Jinhua [another professor at Lingnan University involved in the project] says in her essay, it is both very symbolic and very real, because you see real women with their faces, their work in different parts of the world, and also working in different areas.

So the idea of 1000, it could have been 10,000, 100,000, one million but I think because it was started only three years ago, and also in Switzerland, they were thinking of how this could be feasible. It was quite a wild idea. [laughs] Ruth-Gaby Vermot-Mangold [initiator of the project, Swiss politician] said she had this idea; now she looks back at this and says it was so crazy. She also wondered why she had committed herself in the first place to do it. [laughs]. But I think that when she had that wild idea, then she had support from her friends. I think the other interesting part of this project is that it was started in Switzerland. Of course everyone has this idea of Switzerland, ah, they are for peace, but of course from Switzerland it's more people from the North. Women from the North, and those who started this, were parliamentarians. They work in communications, in business, and they are government officials. So women started the project from the upper ranks of society. But I think it was also very sweet of them to try to think of peace as something that is not only achievable by any individual person or even by individual countries. So there's a very strong element of networking, of linking with women from different parts of the world, especially from parts of the world that they themselves didn't know much about. If they had done this as a European effort, then it could have been so much easier, and then they would have all the links. Even with the bigger understanding of Europe, it could also have been easy for them. But then they were thinking of reaching out to the Pacific islands, to China, to Mongolia, to Latin America [laughs]. So that's the whole idea. It is one collective, and yet, there is a lot of diversity among this collective, and so it's more envisaged as a social movement for peace, but also for women's rights; for women's honour.

MW: This is one of the few projects, that has the shape of a so-called international women's movement that's overcome a lot of the criticism about it being a white western feminist type of movement. As far as the future for the movement goes, do you think a significant basis for networking and collaboration has been established?

LKC: Yes. I think because they started with the association, which is a Swiss association, they needed to form this to get funds, and to have all the administration so that was composed of six persons. Then they had an international coordinators' committee which is composed of twenty people from all different parts of the world. So that's what I am part of. In the last two or three years, the main task has been to try and foster these networks within the regions we are working in. But then at the same time that international level has been going on, because we have been networking and then published the book, and held the exhibition, they would serve as instruments, as the means to be drawing to people's attention that there exist all these other women. So before we had the exhibition, we were aware of the 108 women from China. But now we have the book, the exhibition, and suddenly we are aware that there are all sorts of different faces, different colours, and different ages. So the next step is that this movement should go on, and the association will rename itself as 1000 Peace Women Across the Globe. That is to say we will be using the name of the book, instead of the former name, which was 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005. So we are now reorganizing the association so that it would be ten persons; three from Switzerland and seven from around the world. And then this association will be there to still work with the international committee, and then we will be trying to. We have a lot of wild ideas [laughs], as you can see. We will try to have 1000 exhibitions around the world. We had one in Zurich, we had one in Lingnan, and we will have one on the last Sunday of this month in the Sen Hoi, just two or three bus stops from here [Lingnan University, New Territories, Hong Kong], that's in the open space. The local women have not been nominated as part of the 1000, but then they were the ones who helped weave the net [the net for the exhibition of 1000 Peace Women, held November 11-19, 2005 at Lingnan University]. So they will be presenting the exhibition in the open space and they will be studying some of the stories and they will be the ones to explain the stories. So we are planning some exhibitions. Even the way the postcards were made is very handy. We could have it in the MTR [one of Hong Kong's subway systems], in schools. You can use 1000, or you can choose 100 different selections. So that's also the idea, of trying to reach out to different places.

We were also thinking of more concrete links among the women, especially because we say the focus is on grassroots women, because they don't usually have the resources. They don't have the communication facilities, so the idea, we hope that there will be two layers, two kinds of communities. One will be the grassroots women doing very concrete work, and the other is a kind of a community of intermediaries who could translate, because translation is a very important question, to overcome the language barrier, to write stories about the women, to help them access each other. So we will be working at different levels: one is the more concrete idea of networking and I think in Switzerland they've approached some funders to try and help with certain ways of communication. They were thinking of women's radio in Africa, etc… wild ideas, but some of them will come true. So that will be the networking side and then in Hong Kong, we had some ideas like the peace women club, so some kind of organization to help foster networks. At the same time, because many of us come from universities, we would have some kind of research team, or translation team. I think the University of Bern has already started a website on women and peace. Anyone interested can subscribe to it. If you're interested, or if your friends are interested, you can have your password, you can have some discussions, upload your ideas, etc… That will serve as kind of a web for our discussion. We hope this will happen at different levels. We like all kinds of small non-governmental projects. Of course, we have difficulties in funding, for here we have the support of the university that will give us their name to do things, but no cash, so that's why we have been working with volunteers. We try to do it with minimal physical or cash resources. But then we try to mobilize; there's a lot of energy.

MW: How would you say mainstream conceptions of peace as the absence of war obscure other types of violence that occur in peacetime?

LKC: It's relatively easy to say that there's visible and invisible violence. There is violence during war and conflict times with all the killings and strife and conflict. On the other hand, there's the violence of disease, of poverty, especially the violence under development, of modernization. That is one aspect we want to emphasize. The other aspect is the linkages between politics, economics, cultures, society, etc… so that's why we were trying to say that different kinds of work, that do not seem like peace work, are in fact peace work. If we are working for poverty issues, then we are trying to create peace, especially in the environment, regarding how resources are used, which is the main cause of major wars. These are the aspects we would like to reveal.

MW: Turning to your role as regional coordinator for the China/Taiwan/Hong Kong region. What were some of the highlights for you of participating in the project? For the China region it's difficult. On the one hand, because this is a project which doesn't have government or business support, I think we have been very fortunate that the government hasn't signaled any opposition to this project, so that we have been able to do it as a kind of civil society effort. But on the other hand, because we don't have explicit government support then many people are still a bit scared. "It's a university, but it's from Hong Kong". I think in Mainland China, there's a lot of skepticism because it's not a government project. But then we managed through different circles of friends to try to get the message across and so there have been several good responses. The results were better than we expected because at the beginning we thought that maybe 80 from China would be quite a lot.

MW: Was the number proportional to the population?

LKC: Basically we followed the UN's country list. So Taiwan is somehow part of the China team, but then we tried to specify this as Taiwan (China) to give relatively semi-autonomous status. But of course that's another problem.

First we thought we only had a few months to do the nominations and do promotions, we wanted to try to have different people from different provinces, not just from Beijing. Although we ended up with over 20 that are from Beijing, still we managed some from different provinces. The main problem is that on the one hand we didn't have the main support so that means we are not under the control of government either, so in our list you can see that government officials, some of them dared to be part of this project. And there are grassroots women from the villages. There is a judge. There are quite a few people working in NGOs, there are people from the women's federation, there are academics, quite a good range. Quite a difficult task to persuade people that we are serious about this project, and to convince them of the meaning of this process. We've managed, basically. But there are still, of course, occasional misunderstandings.

The second problem was the very cultural question. Because China in the last two decades has been so supportive of individualism, and profit-oriented, people have become very pragmatic. So when you say this is a project for 1000 women to get the Nobel Peace Prize, the first thing people say is you won't get the prize. So if they thought you're not going to get it, then they wouldn't be interested, at all, in being involved. Although we say that China is a socialist country, a lot of individualism has been promoted in the last two or three decades and we have seen the effect. People are very individualistic, and very egoistic. To be part of 1000, some people are not interested. They are too important [laughs], to be part of a hundred, a thousand, etc… In the process, then, we don't see this only as a project to get the prize, we were thinking of all the things to be done, the networking, and the collective search for alternatives. That's why we said that all of those who are nominated need to consent to this project. In some awards they don't have to consult you, they just nominate you and you find your name somewhere on the cover of a magazine. But then for this project, since one of the main questions is to foster linkages, so that's why we wanted to get consent. In the process many people said, no, I don't want this. There are also cases where people are not really that egoistic, but then they are very modest, so they say, I'm just doing this work, I'm not doing much, I don't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, so we said, well the Nobel Peace Prize isn't really something that great, and we all deserve it, so the question is if the Nobel Peace Prize committee would be smart enough to give the prize to us [laughs].

One other question is all these divisions between Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China and at the political level. Of course we understand all these political discussions about unification, independence, and all this, but then at the people's level, it is also difficult, because people will subscribe to certain ideas reflecting the effects of the Cold War kind of mentality. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, many people think of themselves as representing the freedom camp, where China is all authoritarianism, which is not true. Of course it's authoritarian, there's corruption, but then if you look and compare Taiwanese corruption and Mainland corruption, well [pause] they're different kinds, they have different manifestations. So, that's the difficulty, but that's also the interesting thing about this project. We hope there can be more understanding and to see whether there can be any way out, besides throwing bombs at each other. There has always been talk about this war between Taiwan and Mainland China, and then if you look at the web, in China, people say, "ya, liberate Taiwan, send our troops there". It's very popular, and from Taiwan then they will say, "we represent freedom, we don't want to be part of China". So I think this political issue will also be a major one. And then from Taiwan there are many people who refused to be nominated because they didn't want to see themselves as being under the "big China".

MW: Thank you so much. I wish you the best of luck with the campaign.

To get involved with this movement, you can start by visiting the websites for the campaign www.1000peacewomen.org, and for the China/Hong Kong/Mongolia/Taiwan/Macau region, www.1000peacewomen-hk.org. This will offer you an opportunity to learn about the book, to see the women from all over the world, and to think about how this project can be taken into their communities to question what it is we mean by peace and how women are working toward it. You can write stories about these women, make a movie, a documentary, write an article, or network with the organization to try and sponsor the exhibit in your own area. The sky's the limit!

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