Dickensian tale of two peace prizes

The Confucius and Nobel Peace Prizes of 2010

Confucius, the sage, teacher and reformer of ancient China (a contemporary of Gautama the Buddha, the Enlightened one, of India’s Himalayan foothills and the Gangetic Plain), whose wisdom and virtue gave birth to the movement that has taken his name, died in the sixth century before Christ, but in his work he is living yet.

Confucianism is the ethical code which has for centuries swayed the soul of China. Confucius based his principles of government on his idea of the family; just as a son owed and paid obedience to his father, so a subject owed and paid obedience to his ruler. This respect for paternal authority is the foundation for ancestor worship in China and Chinese communities worldwide.

Confucianism

In the 1940s, Liu Shaoqui, one of the five-strong leadership group around Mao, argued that the essence of being an effective communist was the same as becoming a good Confucian – inner steel, self criticism and self discipline. At the same time the communists routinely damned Confucianism for trapping China in hidebound pre-modern traditions, corruption and suffocating poverty.

The Government of Singapore has also shown an interest in Confucianism as a social theory, a model for good citizenship and a catalyst for economic advancement. One time Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore the late Goh Keng Swee in 1990 at a conference organised by the Institute of East Asian Philosophies on ‘Confucian Humanism and Modernisation: The Institutional Imperatives,’ in a speech entitled ‘Economic Growth and the Intelligentsia – A Comparison of the Experience in the Mainland and the Periphery,’ asked the question, ‘If the economic success of the four small dragons (Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan) is due to Confucian tradition, why has the homeland of Confucius not achieved similar success?’

Goh answered his own question by saying that ‘while the Confucian ethic had contributed to their success, at the same time, market competition had eliminated certain traditional attitudes aligned to Confucianism, such as disdain for merchants or the wish by talented youths to become officials. Proven ability had become more important, in the four small dragons, than nepotistic connections, but this was not the case with the big dragon, mainland China.’

The prizes

In China, a few days ago, an international peace prize was awarded bearing Confucius’s name.

First awarded in 1901, the Nobel Prizes were established through a bequest of $ 9.2 million from Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-’96), a Swedish chemical engineer and the inventor of dynamite and other explosives and by a gift of the Bank of Sweden.

Nobel’s will directed that the interest from the fund be divided annually among specified categories of people who have significant achievements in diverse fields, including that individual or group that has ‘ done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.

The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in December 2010 to Liu Xiaobo of China, poet, essayist and campaigner for human rights, who was not present at the Oslo presentation event.

The inaugural Confucius Peace Prize was awarded the day before the Oslo event, at Beijing to a Taiwanese politician Lien Chan, a former vice president. While both prizes ostensibly professed to celebrate peace, another similarity was that both winners were not present.

Liu Xiaobo was in a jail in remote north eastern China, serving a sentence after being convicted of subverting State power. The prize was placed on an empty chair on the podium, in the full glare of international publicity.

Recently the communist Government of China has resurrected Confucius. The 2010 inaugural Confucius Peace Prize was accepted by a six-year-old girl, an ‘angel of peace’ on behalf of Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician, a former Vice President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) who is quoted as saying that he was not present on the occasion ‘because he did not take it seriously’. He was reportedly selected in recognition for his work in improving relations with mainland China.

Oslo event

The Oslo event was attended by the embassies of the 64 countries represented in Sweden except 18 , the boycotters included China, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka.

One could certainly expect countries like Vietnam, Cuba and Iran to stand up for a government’s sovereign right to lock up peaceful dissidents. Pakistan and Sri Lanka are nations which have been helped by China. Philippines was a surprise, they pleaded a scheduling conflict!

Gautama the Buddha’s exhortation in the Maha Mangala Sutra, ‘Aseva-nacha Baalanang, Pandithaa-nancha Sevenaa’ comes to mind (do not associate with lesser beings, associate with learned scholars).

Communist and one party states, dictatorships, absolute monarchies, autocracies, failed states, states in which the validity of elections are being currently challenged, countries whose ambassadors had scheduling conflicts and our own ‘five star’ democracy consist of the wide and varied boycotters of the Oslo event.

It has been said that a person is judged by the company he keeps. But the reality of the compulsions which led to Sri Lanka joining the other boycotters have to be assessed on the basis of the current geopolitical realities and the fact that China is such a large player in our economy as the largest donor and provider of grants and subsidised and commercial loans and that Chinese Government corporations and labourers are working on a large number of infrastructure projects in all parts of the island.

Relations with China

Our relations with the Middle Kingdom go back to ancient times where goods from the East and West were traded and exchanged at Gokanna (Trincomalee) Anuradhapura and Manthai (Mannar), to Admiral Cheng Ho’s visit to Galle in the 1400s and more recently the Rubber Rice Pact, gift of the BMICH, a Centre for the Performing Arts, an International Conference Centre and the bunkering facility for vessels at Hambantota, etc.

So also Pakistan, just after the Oslo event Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visited Pakistan and unveiled $ 35 billion in economic deals; $ 20 billion government to government and $ 15 billion in private sector deals. Compare and contrast this with the mere $ 16 billion deals PM Wen signed with India; News Delhi was his last stop before Islamabad.

The last time the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize could not attend and could not send a representative because he was in jail was in 1935, when the laureate Carl von Ossietzky was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp and Hitler forbade any sympathisers from attending the event.

Even in 1991 when Burma’s famous and recently released from house arrest, dissident Aung Sang Suu Kyi, was the winner of the $ 1.5, million check for the prize, and she was locked up by the ruling generals of Burma, her son accepted it and spoke on her behalf.

For Liu Xiaobo, there was no representative, a statement made at his earlier trial in Beijing entitled ‘I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court’ was read out by the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann.

Through his wife, who is confined to her house in Beijing, Liu sent word that he wanted to dedicate the award to the ‘lost souls’ massacred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square. Liu assisted in resolving the confrontations between protestors and police at Tiananmen, but was detained in 2008 after co-authoring the Charter 08, calling for reform and human rights in China.

With power comes responsibility

Thorbjorn Jagland, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a former Prime Minister of Norway, said that he was given the award because of his heroic and nonviolent struggles on behalf of democracy and human rights, adding that China needed to learn that with economic power came social and political responsibility.

He further said: “We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders. If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favourable impact on the world. Many will ask whether China’s weakness – for all the strengths the country is currently showing – is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.”

Tan Changliu, Chairman of the Panel of Judges for the Confucius prize, said that the winner had beaten five other nominees including Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter. He said it was a peaceful response to the Nobel Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo.

Tan claimed that the Confucius award had a longer history than the Nobel Peace Prize; they had been preparing for it since 1988. It should be noted that Nobel was first awarded in 1901!

Low profile

The Yuan 100,000 (pounds sterling 9,500) Confucius Prize had been donated by an anonymous well wisher, the judges were low profile Chinese academics. The event was held in what has been described as a ‘hastily convened press conference cum ceremony, in a meeting room in a Beijing hotel’. There is no information available in the public domain of what diplomatic representation, if any, was present at the Beijing event.

Qiao Damo, a Chinese poet, who was one of the organisers of the Confucius Peace Prize, and it is reported was also shortlisted for it, said: “We thought it better to have a prize that suits Eastern values of peace, which are different from Norway and the West.”

The Confucius Prize brochure said: “Norway is only a small country. With over one billion people, China should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace.”

The world has heard and is tired of hearing this self-serving recital of Asian and/or Eastern values, by autocrats of various hues before; it’s time we began to talk of universal values which underpin the Dasa Raja Dharma (10 Royal Virtues), rules of Good Governance, the UN Declarations on Human, Social and Economic Rights and the Rule of Law.

Diplomatic offensive

Beijing mounted a massive diplomatic offensive to get nations to boycott the Oslo event. It described the event as a Western plot to hold back a rising China, branding the awards supporters as ‘clowns’. The Global Times, a populist tabloid affiliated with the Communist Party-owned People’s Daily called the Oslo event a ‘political farce’ and Oslo itself a ‘cult centre’.

A lone Chinese blogger posted the image of empty chair at the Oslo Nobel event, on the country’s most popular micro blogging site, it was deleted within minutes. All mention of the pageantry at the Oslo award ceremony was scrubbed from the Chinese internet. BBC and CNN coverage of the event was blacked out.

China well knows that its high international profile makes the rest of the world dependent on access to market and manufacturing prowess. It thinks it is in a position to dictate terms to the rest of the world as to how China should be treated.

While in economic terms and in the ability to influence other nations this may be true up to a point, as can be seen from the boycotters of the Oslo event, that there are limits.

Iranian example

On a comparative basis, it can be said that Iran probably handled the situation with much more finesse when Iranian Human Rights campaigner Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Government complained loudly that Iran was being insulted and traduced, but when Ebadi came to Oslo to pick up her prize, the Iranian Ambassador was sitting in the front row applauding! That defused the entire public relations problem for Iran. Later back in Tehran, in a police raid on her house the Nobel medal was confiscated! But by that time the international interest had waned.

China by its reaction to the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize has created a potential icon in Liu Xiaobo, on par with Nelson Mandela, An Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King and other iconic winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in the past.

In some aspects, both the Confucius Peace and Nobel Peace Prizes echo the words of French existentialist philosopher novelist Jean-Paul Sartre: “In the present situation, the Nobel Prize stands objectively as a distinction reserved for the writers of the West or the rebels of the East.”

The lesson of history is that political prisoners, in general, are a potential problem for regimes which imprison them. Charles Dickens would have without doubt spun a good yarn around 2010’s rival peace prizes, to rival his classic ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ written in 1859, a story located in London and Paris, before and after the French Revolution, albeit with Chinese and Norwegian characteristics, located in Beijing and Oslo in 2010!

(The writer is a lawyer, who has over 30 years experience as a CEO in both government and private sectors. He retired from the office of Secretary, Ministry of Finance and currently is the Managing Director of the Sri Lanka Business Development Centre.)