China Digital Times (CDT) is being honored with the 2025 Democracy Award for its unwavering commitment to documenting the Chinese people’s struggle for truth and freedom in the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s vast censorship apparatus. Founded in 2003, CDT is the world’s foremost source exposing how Chinese citizens challenge and circumvent authoritarian control online. Through meticulous archiving and translation of censored materials, CDT preserves a living record of the Chinese people’s voices—voices the regime strives to erase. Its work ensures that truth endures, even under one of the world’s most sophisticated systems of repression.
CDT’s founder and editor-in-chief, Xiao Qiang, accepts the award on the organization’s behalf. A theoretical physicist by training, Xiao became a full-time human rights advocate following the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Since then, he has spent more than three decades exposing censorship and repression in China, combining cutting-edge digital research with deep moral conviction. Through his leadership at CDT, Xiao has amplified voices the regime seeks to silence and has built an enduring platform that empowers others to challenge authoritarian control with truth and transparency.
The Democracy Award, presented annually by NED’s Board of Directors, recognizes the courageous work of individuals and organizations that have advanced human rights and democracy around the world. The award itself is a replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue raised by students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989—a symbol of the universal aspiration for freedom. While the statue was destroyed, its image endures as a reminder that the human spirit cannot be silenced.
Remarks by Xiao Qiang upon accepting the 2025 Democracy Award for China Digital Times:
I am deeply honored to accept this award on behalf of the China Digital Times team—past and present—and the countless netizens inside the Great Firewall whose courage to speak, document, and share truth keeps the light of freedom alive. Their quiet defiance is the moral foundation of our work.
I also want to acknowledge my co-awardee, Rushan Abbas, and the Campaign for Uyghurs. Our paths converge in the same vital struggle—to defend human dignity against systems of repression and forgetting. My deepest gratitude goes to the National Endowment for Democracy for recognizing not just our work, but the spirit behind it: the conviction that truth matters, and that every voice counts.
At CDT, our mission is to speak truth to power—not with hatred, but with clarity and courage—and to preserve collective memory as history. In China’s digital darkness, words, images, and testimonies are constantly erased. Yet each act of remembrance, each shared fragment of reality, becomes part of a collective memory that no censorship can destroy. It is through memory that a people reclaim their humanity.
As artificial intelligence transforms our world, we face a defining challenge. Information control is the core of authoritarian stability—the Great Firewall’s very condition of survival.
Democracy, in contrast, depends on openness. Under authoritarianism, AI serves control, surveillance and manipulation; under democracy, it must expand human freedom and moral imagination. The future of AI will test not only our technologies, but our values—and ultimately, our humanity.
Freedom begins with truth—and truth, when preserved in collective memory, becomes the seed of a freer future. Thank you.
