http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/world/asia/chinas-confucius-prize-awarded-to-vladimir-putin.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
In China, Confucius Prize Awarded to Putin
By EDWARD WONG
Published: November 15, 2011
a.. BEIJING — The Chinese committee that awarded this year's Confucius Peace Prize minced no words in honoring the winner, Vladimir V. Putin, prime minister of Russia.
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It praised his decision to go to war in Chechnya in 1999.
"His iron hand and toughness revealed in this war impressed the Russians a lot, and he was regarded to be capable of bringing safety and stability to Russia," read an English version of the committee's statement. "He became the anti-terrorist No. 1 and the national hero."
So went the announcement by a group of 16 patriotic scholars awarding what they call their second annual "grass-roots" peace prize. Four members of the group, the China International Peace Studies Center, held a news conference on Sunday in the Fragrant Hills west of central Beijing, but there was curiously little reporting in the Chinese press about the award. Then word spread over Twitter on Tuesday that Mr. Putin, who had engaged in wars in Chechnya and Georgia, had won the prize, which has been steeped in political intrigue in recent months.
"Those wars were righteous wars," Qiao Damo, the self-described co-founder and president of the Confucius Peace Prize committee, said in a telephone interview. "Mr. Putin fought for the unification of his country."
Mr. Qiao also said that the committee, which had voted for Mr. Putin from among eight nominees, valued Mr. Putin for his opposition to war. "He was against NATO bombing of Libya," Mr. Qiao said.
The announcement praised Mr. Putin, too, for being selected to join the K.G.B. while in college, "which made true his teenage dream of joining the K.G.B.," and for "acting as the propagandist of current political events" while in high school. Much later, of course, came the "large-scale military action towards the illegal armed forces in Grozny, Chechnya."
The award, co-sponsored this year by Moutai, a liquor company, was first given out last year as a rejoinder by a group of Chinese to the Nobel committee's decision to give the coveted Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned dissident writer who has called for democratic reforms in China. Mr. Qiao said this year's ceremony would be held on Dec. 9, and organizers hoped to hand a gilded statuette of Confucius, the Chinese sage, to Mr. Putin, along with a certificate. The award announcement did not mention any cash prize.
"The committee has already notified the Russian Embassy in Beijing," Mr. Qiao said. "The committee fully respects Mr. Putin's decision to attend or not to attend the ceremony."
The winner last year, Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician, said he had never heard of the award when contacted by foreign journalists. He did not show up at the ceremony, even though the award came with the equivalent of $15,000 in cash. Instead, a young girl with no relation to Mr. Lien accepted a statuette and a bundle of bills.
When asked about the award on Tuesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, told a reporter in Moscow: "We have only heard about the award from the press. We do not know much about the prize."
The announcement by the committee in Beijing said that since the award had only recently been founded, "it is allowed that the winner doesn't accept and even rejects it."
Earlier this fall, there were questions about whether a second Confucius Peace Prize would be awarded at all. The Culture Ministry had issued an order to the committee of scholars to disassociate itself from the ministry and not to advertise that the award had the ministry's support.
At the time, the group called itself the Traditional Culture Protection Department under the Association of Chinese Indigenous Arts, which is registered with the Culture Ministry. On Sept. 19, the ministry ordered the so-called protection department to disband. The order said that the department had held a news conference on Sept. 17 about the second Confucius Peace Prize without official approval, and that the group had improperly used the ministry's name.
In an interview at the time, Liu Haofeng, a co-founder of the Confucius prize, said the group was the victim of political strife: Wealthy men who wanted to award their own Confucius prize — called the Confucius World Peace Prize — had persuaded the Culture Ministry to sever relations with Mr. Liu's group.
"The ministry supports the World Peace Prize, but my Confucius Peace Prize is the first and only," Mr. Liu said while vowing to proceed with the awarding of the original prize.
As it turns out, Mr. Liu had nothing to do with the prize bestowed on Sunday to Mr. Putin. Mr. Qiao said Tuesday that Mr. Liu had split off from the committee in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the group still has no association with the Chinese government and was describing itself as a nongovernmental organization registered in Hong Kong, Mr. Qiao said.
"The Confucius Peace Prize is independent, pure and clean," he said. "It represents the grass roots."
Reached by telephone, Mr. Liu said he had left the group because the members "don't take the prize very seriously." He said the organizers had failed to hold a meeting where members could vote; instead the voting was done via telephone calls and text messaging. "I find that unacceptable," he said.
Mr. Liu said he planned to register a new organization in Hong Kong and start his own award, the World Harmony Prize. It would be co-supported by an American group in Washington, he said.
Besides Mr. Putin, candidates for this year's Confucius Peace Prize included Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft; Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor; Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president; Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations; Yuan Longping, a Chinese scientist; Soong Chu-yu, a Taiwanese politician; and a Tibetan boy named by Chinese officials as the Panchen Lama after the abduction of a candidate supported by the exiled Dalai Lama.
Mr. Putin got nine votes, Mr. Yuan six and Ms. Merkel one, Mr. Qiao said.
Among the 16 voting committee members was Kong Qingdong, a professor of Chinese literature at Peking University who has boasted that he is in the 73rd generation of Confucius' lineage. Mr. Kong is also famously known for cursing at a Chinese journalist on Nov. 7, which has prompted editors at Xinhua, the state news agency, and students at Peking University to demand Mr. Kong's resignation.
As for the competing prize associated with the Culture Ministry, the Confucius World Peace Prize, an announcement posted last month on the ministry's Web site said the group that had proposed the award had decided not to distribute it.
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