Call it a Peace Prize with Chinese characteristics.
With only a few days to go until the ceremony marking jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize, a Chinese NGO has announced the winner of the Confucius Prize, which it describes in a statement as “the Peace Prize reconstructed according to Oriental thought.”
The announcement follows a November 16 editorial (in Chinese) in the Global Times, a tabloid affiliated with Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, calling for the establishment of a Confucius Prize as a way for “the Chinese to declare China’s views on peace and human rights to the world.”
An English version of the editorial, by Liu Zhiqin, identified as Zurich Bank’s chief representative in Beijing, was published a day later.
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.
Asked by China Real Time whether the Ministry of Culture had any relationship with the Confucius Prize awards committee, a ministry spokeswoman said: “There are so many organizations affiliated with the ministry. It’s hard for us to check.”
Besides Mr. Lien, the awards committee also considered Chinese poet Qiao Damo, scientist Yuan Longping, the Panchen Lama, Nelson Mandela, Mahmoud Abbas, Bill Gates and Jimmy Carter.
The awarding of the prize to Mr. Lien will be officially announced at a press conference on Wednesday. According to AP, the prize comes with a purse of 100,000 yuan, or roughly $15,000.
The committee’s decision on the winner was “unanimous,” Mr. Tan told China Real Time, without elaborating.
The Confucius Prize isn’t the first rival the Nobel Peace Prize has weathered. In 1937, Adolf Hitler established the German National Prize for Art and Science as an alternative to the Nobel, which a year earlier had been awarded to German journalist Carl von Ossietzky. Thirteen years later, the Soviet Union announced the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples, renamed the Lenin Peace Prize in 1989 and discontinued after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Among the recipients of the first Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples was Soong Ching Ling, widow of Sun Yat-sen and vice chairman of the then newly born People’s Republic of China.