BEIJING — A Chinese group has awarded a peace prize to a Taiwanese official too surprised to travel to Beijing to accept the award apparently created to counter the Nobel prize honoring an imprisoned dissident.
Instead, a young girl accepted the Confucius Peace Prize and money on behalf of former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan. It is not known what connection, if any, she had to Lien.
Thursday's ceremony for the Confucius Peace Prize was a day before the Nobel ceremony in Oslo that China is boycotting because it honors democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for co-authoring an appeal for political reform.
The Chinese prize's organizing group is not a government body but worked closely with the Ministry of Culture, awards committee chairman Tan Changliu acknowledged to the AP this week.
Tan refused Thursday to comment on Liu. "We don't want to link this peace prize with those three words," referring to Liu Xiaobo's name.
The newly created Confucius prize, which comes with $15,000 (100,000 yuan), was named after the philosopher and is intended to give the Chinese "viewpoint of peace," according to the committee that created it.
On Wednesday, Lien's office in Taipei said he had no plans to travel to Beijing because he knew nothing about the award.
The honorary chairman of Taiwan's Nationalist Party, he was recognized for his efforts at building peace between the mainland and Taiwan, an island territory that split from Communist China amid civil war 60 years ago.
Beijing has called Liu's Nobel a Western plot against China.
Authorities waged a propaganda campaign to demonize him, placed his wife and other activists under house arrest, and sought to pressure foreign governments into boycotting the awards ceremony. About 18 declined Nobel invitations, mainly Beijing's allies or business partners.