China creates new Serve China prize

A committee in China has invented a faux Nobel peace prize, the Confucius Peace Prize, which is being given this year for the first time, to none other than longtime authoritarian and KMT heavyweight Lien Chan, whose son was shot by mistake the other day. AFP reports:

Named after the famed philosopher, the new prize was created to "interpret the viewpoints of peace of (the) Chinese (people)," the awards committee said in a statement it released to the AP on Tuesday.

Awards committee chairman Tan Changliu said his group was not an official government body, but acknowledged that it worked closely with the Ministry of Culture. He declined to give specifics about the committee, when it was created and how the five judges were chosen, saying it would be disclosed later.

The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having "built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday because she knew nothing about the prize.

.....

Tan, who leads the awards committee, acknowledged that the new prize, which comes with a purse of 100,000 yuan ($15,000), doesn't have international recognition: "It needs to grow gradually, and we hope people will believe the award is of global significance."

This victim mentality prize? Note how the prize is envisioned -- for fulfilling the Chinese definition of peace, opposing "China" to the international standard. Scary/hilarious. The first choice, of Lien Chan, is sublimely parodic, the perfect culmination to a profoundly silly idea. The stinginess of the award, a mere $15,000, is the cherry on top of this dessert. How different this idea is from the USSR's Nobel parody, the Lenin (originally Stalin) Peace Prize, "awarded by a panel appointed by the Soviet government, to notable individuals whom the panel indicated had 'strengthened peace among peoples'" (Wiki). The prize went to Communists and sympathizers, but even so, the USSR felt that a pretense of universality was necessary.
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