In response to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo, a group of Chinese created an alternative prize called the Confucius Peace Prize, which the Global Times heralded as, “a weapon in the battle of ideas.” Yet the recipient, Chairman Emeritus of Taiwan’s Kuomintang Party, Lien Chan, did not attend the ceremony and announced no intention of receiving the RMB100,000 award. The New York Times reports from the question and answer portion of the ceremony,m during which organizers were peppered with questions about Liu Xiaobo:
Tan Changliu, chairman of the committee, made every attempt to steer the conversation away from that subject. In a page seemingly taken from the Harry Potter books, he tried to avoid referring to Mr. Liu by name, instead calling him the man “with the three-character name.”
Mr. Tan said the prize was meant to give “a Chinese perspective on peace.” When pressed on its relation to the Norwegian prize, he said that China had had a longer history with peace. He added, “Did the Nobel Peace Prize influence Confucius, or did Confucius influence the Nobel Peace Prize?”
The panel distributed a booklet that opened with a paragraph saying the 1.3-billion-strong nation of China “should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace” and that “Norway is only a small country with scarce land area and population.”
[…] Worn down by so many questions, Zhao Zhenjiang, one of the judges, went on a tirade against the United States and wondered aloud why Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize last year when he is staging military exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea.
See also, “What if they gave a Confucius Peace Prize and nobody came?” from Useless Tree, which points us to these two videos:
A parody created by Next Media Animation:
And a report from Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan:
