BEIJING – Only three weeks after the idea was first publicly
floated, China has cobbled together its own peace prize and plans
to award it Thursday — the day before the
Nobel
Committee honors an imprisoned Chinese dissident
in a move that has enraged Beijing.
Since Liu Xiaobo's selection, China has vilified the 54-year-old
democracy advocate, called the choice an effort by the West to
contain its rise, disparaged his supporters as "clowns," and
launched a campaign to persuade countries not to attend Friday's
ceremony in Oslo. The government is also preventing Liu — who is
serving an 11-year sentence for co-authoring a bold appeal for
political reforms in the Communist country — and his family members
from attending.
Amid the flurry of action came a commentary published on Nov. 17
in a Communist Party-approved tabloid that suggested China create
its own award — the "Confucius Peace Prize" — to counter the choice
of Liu.
Three weeks later, The Associated Press has learned, China is
doing just that.
Named after the famed philosopher, the new prize was created to
"interpret the viewpoints of peace of (the) Chinese (people)," the
awards committee said in a statement it released to the AP on
Tuesday.
Awards committee chairman Tan Changliu said his group was not an
official government body, but acknowledged that it worked closely
with the Ministry of Culture. He declined to give specifics about
the committee, when it was created and how the five judges were
chosen, saying it would be disclosed later.
The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president
and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having
"built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A
staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday
because she knew nothing about the prize.
Lien was chosen from among eight nominees — some of whom are
regularly mentioned for, or have already won, that other peace
prize: including billionaire Bill Gates, former South African
President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter,
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Panchen Lama, the
second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.
While China regularly disparages the Dalai Lama, the religion's
spiritual leader, the current Panchen Lama is a 20-year-old who was
hand-picked by Beijing. The original boy named by the Dalai Lama
has disappeared.
"We should not compete, we should not confront the Nobel Prize,
but we should try to set up another standard," said Liu Zhiqin, the
Beijing businessman who suggested the prize in The Global Times.
"The Nobel prize is not a holy thing that we cannot doubt or
question. Everyone has a right to dispute whether it's right or
wrong." Liu said in the phone interview that he was not involved in
setting up the new awards.
Tan, who leads the awards committee, acknowledged that the new
prize, which comes with a purse of 100,000 yuan ($15,000), doesn't
have international recognition: "It needs to grow gradually, and we
hope people will believe the award is of global significance."
China is not the first nation to be rankled by a Nobel Peace
Prize. During Nazi Germany era, Adolf Hitler created the German
National Prize for Art and Science in 1937 as a replacement for the
Nobel. He had forbidden German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky from
accepting his Nobel awarded in 1935.
This year, China's clampdown against Liu and his supporters
means the Nobel medal and money won't be handed out for the first
time since that period. Nobel officials say the prestigious $1.4
million award can be collected only by the laureate or close family
members.
In the meantime, China is chipping away at the Nobel: It
succeeded in persuading 18 other countries to boycott the upcoming
ceremony, including longtime allies like Pakistan, Venezuela and
Cuba as well as business partners Saudi Arabia and Iran, Nobel
officials said Tuesday.
Beijing sharpened its denunciations, with Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Jiang Yu accusing the Nobel committee of "orchestrating
an anti-China farce by themselves."
"We are not changing because of interference by a few clowns and
we will not change our path," she said.
But Beijing's hastily arranged efforts to provide a distraction
to the Nobel ceremony are counterproductive, said Oxford University
China scholar Steve Tsang.
"The whole thing is too obviously being rushed to counter the
Nobel Prize to Liu Xiaobo. People will see it for what it is. That
being the case, it's not going to be very credible," he said.
If anything, China's heavy-handed reactions in the wake of the
announcement, which include putting Liu's wife and other supporters
under house arrest and barring dozens of activists from traveling
to Oslo, "simply give the rest of the world the impression that
human rights is really in trouble in China," he said.
