China: Not Ready for Primetime December 9, 2010
Posted by Jason in Uncategorized.trackback
A hilarious article from The New York Times about the Confucius Peace Prize, the award that the Chinese government put together at the last second to counterprogram the Nobel Prize Committee’s Peace Prize Ceremony.
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.”
The excellent China Real Time Report in the Wall Street Journal also ran a story about the prize. This farce puts China in unfortunate company:
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.
What this reminds me of most is actually the 2008 campaign. Remember when Barack Obama went to speak in Berlin at the Tiergarten? Well, John McCain was busy meeting reporters in Columbus, Ohio, at Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant, which is in the German Village district.
In what was clearly not a coincidence, McCain spoke with reporters shortly before Obama began his speech at Berlin’s Victory Column.
At the same time, The Republican National Committee was running anti-Obama ads in Berlin, Pa., and other namesake villages in Wisconsin and New Hampshire.
12/20/10 UPDATE:
Our anonymous commenter may have been right. We’re starting to see retractions, like this one from an article in the Huffington Post– you can read the whole article here.
* The Confucius Prize may not have been as directly linked to the Chinese government as early reports in the international press and this blog post when it first appeared suggested. As of now, much about the prize remains murky. What we do know is that the head of the prize committee is reported to have told an AP reporter that, while his group was not an official organization, it “worked closely with the Ministry of Culture,” and that the idea for the prize was floated in mid-November in the Global Times newspaper, an officially endorsed organ tied to People’s Daily. The light coverage of the Confucius Prize in the Chinese press after it was awarded suggests that it may have had only limited official support from the beginning, or that efforts were made to downplay its importance once it became clear it was turning into a public relations fiasco.
News That Stays News 
My girlfriend told me about this, but when we looked into it we found no substance at all – we suspect these guys just set themselves up, and emailed gullible foreign reporters about it. It really doesn’t look like a government conspiracy.
I’d like to see what you found- I can buy that theory as well; there are a lot of nationalist Chinese folks out there willing to do all sorts of things, independent of the government- but I’d still be surprised if nobody in the CCP had hand in it.