Comic Relief

By Khmer Democrat, Phnom Penh
Let's Make an Ass of Dictators Series

Winner of Beijing’s Peace Award Is Also Absent

By BENJAMIN HAAS and EDWARD WONG
December 9, 2010 (International Herald Tribune)

A young girl with no apparent connection to former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan accepted on his behalf the certificate for the Confucius Prize on Thursday in Beijing.

BEIJING — The Confucius Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize have an obvious theme in common: Both promote peace. The two prizes also share something else: Winners absent from the award ceremonies this week.

The Confucius prize was conceived in recent weeks by a group of patriotic Chinese as an answer to the Nobel Peace Prize, which will be officially granted to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident serving an 11-year prison sentence, in a ceremony in Oslo on Friday.

But the ceremony for the Confucius prize, which took place Thursday afternoon, was a bare-bones affair. The winner, Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician friendly to the Chinese Communist Party, did not show up at the conference room in downtown Beijing where the prize committee had gathered. Nor has he expressed any intention of accepting the prize, which comes with a $15,000 award.

That presented the committee with a problem: Who would collect the prize?

In a room packed with mostly foreign reporters, a young girl who apparently had no connection to Mr. Lien accepted a 10-inch circle-shaped statuette. There was little fanfare — the prize committee uttered just a single line announcing the winner, then took questions.

At that point, the committee was peppered with inquiries about its views on the Nobel Peace Prize and Mr. Liu.

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 that China, with its 1.3 billion people, “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.”

The booklet had brief profiles of the eight candidates the committee had considered for the prize — including three mainland Chinese and two Americans, Bill Gates and Jimmy Carter — and the five Chinese judges, all middle-age men with ties to famous universities in Beijing. Mr. Tan has said that the group was not a government organization, though it works closely with the Ministry of Culture.

Worn down by so many questions, Zhao Zhenjiang, one of the judges, went on a tirade against the United States and wondered aloud why President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize last year when he is staging military exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea.

Finally, after more than a half-hour of back-to-back questions about the dissident who must not be named, Mr. Tan relented. “If you really want to talk about Liu Xiaobo,” he said, “in 500 years you will see history is on our side.”