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EDITORIAL: What now
for the Confucius prize?
Former vice president Lien Chan (³s¾Ô) may go down in history as the first ¡X and
last ¡X ¡§winner¡¨ of the Confucius Peace Prize, after the Chinese Ministry of
Culture reportedly ordered that this year¡¦s award ceremony should be scrapped.
Or maybe not.
The news out of Beijing about the prize, and who organizes it, is just as mixed
up and farcical as it was last year, when a group of academics and other
¡§Chinese patriots¡¨ announced the award and then went on to present it just one
day before the Nobel committee in Norway awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed
Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (¼B¾åªi).
The Confucius prize had first been suggested in an opinion piece in the Global
Times, owned by Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the People¡¦s Daily, shortly
after the award to Liu had been announced to much gnashing of teeth and howls of
protest in Beijing. The apparatchiks condemned the award to Liu as a Western
plot against China that had hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. Lo and
behold, just three weeks later, a group headed by ¡§Confucius Peace Prize jury
chairman¡¨ Tan Changliu (ÃÓªø¬y) announced that Lien had won the inaugural Confucius
award for his contribution to the development of cross-strait relations and
world peace.
At the time, Tan said his organization was a private group with no links to the
Chinese government and that they had been preparing for years to create an award
to promote world peace from an ¡§Eastern¡¨ perspective. Most people had a hard
time believing him.
At the award ceremony in Beijing, which was even more chaotic than the initial
press conference, Lien was a no-show and a little girl was hauled up before the
cameras to accept the stack of cash that was supposed to be the US$15,000 prize.
A brochure handed out at the ceremony declared that given its huge population,
China should have more of a say about world peace than tiny Norway.
Undeterred by last year¡¦s mess, earlier this month the China Native Art
Association¡¦s Culture Protection Bureau announced its list of candidates for
this year¡¦s Confucius prize: the Beijing-appointed Panchen Lama (as opposed to
the one recognized by the Dalai Lama), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, South African President Jacob Zuma and
81-year-old Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping (°KÀsµÓ), who first
developed hybrid rice species in the 1970s.
The clear winner on that list would appear to be Yuan, whose contribution to
crop productivity helped reduce famine in many areas and thereby contributed to
world peace as much as Kenya¡¦s environmental campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Wangari Maathai did with her tree-planting and campaigns to empower
rural women. Given the choice of Lien, however, the jury would probably go for
Putin.
This week, the art association announced in a message on the culture ministry
Web site that the bureau had been disbanded and the second Confucius award was
canceled. The ministry said the bureau had not received permission to promote
the event and again disavowed any connection to the prize.
Yet that same day the award¡¦s chairman said there would still be an award
ceremony in December and that other organizations were competing to sponsor the
prize.
Perhaps it was all the embarrassing headlines surrounding last year¡¦s debacle ¡X
not good considering Beijing¡¦s push to get its Confucius Institutes into more
countries and universities. Or perhaps the Beijing mandarins don¡¦t want another
reminder of how far they have strayed from Confucius¡¦ own teachings that
stressed the need for moral rulers, leading by example and judicial equality.
Given his belief that an ¡§oppressive government is fiercer and more feared than
a tiger,¡¨ Confucius might have found himself sharing a jail cell with Liu
instead of dining with the elite at Zhongnanhai.
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