Fidel Castro, the longtime Cuban dictator, has been chosen as the 2014 recipient of the semi-official, semi-farcical Confucius Peace Prize, an award created by the Chinese government as a countermeasure to the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Confucius Peace Prize was set up in 2010 as a cantankerous response to the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision that year to award its Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Mr. Liu was, and still is, serving an 11-year jail term for advocating constitutional rule and respect for human rights in China.
Responding to the committee’s decision to “support a criminal [like Liu Xiaobo],” the Chinese Confucius Peace Prize was created “to declare China’s view in peace and human rights to the world,” according to its founders. It carries a cash prize of $15,000 in comparison with the Nobel Prize’s $1.5 million.
“The Confucius Peace Prize is designed to convey the Chinese view of peace and Oriental thoughts on peace to complement the Nobel Peace Prize as an award representing the Western perspective,” one of the Confucius Peace Prize founders told the South China Morning Post in 2012.
The first Confucius Peace Prize went to the Taiwanese politician-turned-pro-Beijing figure Lien Chan, and the second went to Russia’s then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, citing Mr. Putin’s strong opposition to the West’s intervention in Libya.
However, the Confucius Peace Prize has been widely mocked as a farcical attempt on the part of the Chinese to resist overwhelming world opinion against Beijing’s egregious human rights violations and its consistent attempts to stifle dissent. The prize is considered so silly and notorious that none of the foreign recipients even bothered to acknowledge the award, let alone show up to receive the dubious honor in person at the pompous ceremony. Chinese official media reported that Cuban students in China will accept this year’s honor on behalf of Mr. Castro.
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The Chinese prize is often compared to Hitler’s German National Prize for Art and Science and the Soviet Union’s Stalin Peace Prize and its corollary the Lenin Peace Prize. In all the three cases, a new prize was created as an alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize to register the dictatorial government’s displeasure at the honoring its own citizens’ courage and efforts to promote world peace and human rights.
In 1936, Carl von Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pacifism and human rights advocacy. But much like China’s Mr. Liu, Ossietzky was a political prisoner who was persecuted by the Third Reich. Hitler in reaction created the Nazi peace prize as an alternative to represent the Nazis’ view on peace.
Stalin was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948 but didn’t get it. The enraged Soviet dictator then created an alternative in 1949 in his own name, officially known as “the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace among Peoples,” or the Stalin Peace Prize for short, which gave out its first prize in 1950. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and his denunciation by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, his award was renamed the Lenin Peace Prize. But the prize continued to be known collectively as the Stalin/Lenin Peace Prize until the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s.
Two Chinese Communists were recipients of the Stalin/Lenin Peace Prize. Soong Ching-ling, Mao’s “Peace Offensive” chief in the early years of Communist China, especially during the Korean War, was honored in Moscow in 1950. Guo Moruo, Mao’s leading literary sycophant, received the proletarian honor in 1951.
Interestingly, Mr. Castro was awarded the 1961 Stalin/Lenin Peace Prize. He probably would never have thought that, 53 years later, he would still be around fighting the imperialists, let alone being honored by his Chinese comrades in Beijing with a Confucius Peace Prize.
• Miles Yu’s column appears Fridays. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com and @Yu_miles.
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• Miles Yu can be reached at yu123@washingtontimes.com.
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