The Confucius Peace Prize was awarded last week. According to the New York Times, the Confucius Peace Prize is “the Chinese answer to the Nobel Peace Prize.” Based on its short history, it is a pale imitation.
Wikipedia describes Confucius as a “Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher.” That covers a lot of ground and belies the fact that he died almost 2,500 years ago. The foundation of Confucian philosophy is morality, justice, and sincerity. The good qualities conveyed by this short resume of Confucius are not readily apparent in the resumes of CPP winners.
The first winner of the CPP was Vladimir Putin in 2011. How he embodies the promotion of world peace from an Eastern perspective is at best uncertain and at worst antithetical. It is unclear from my admittedly limited reading that Putin has ever advocated or furthered peace. An exception that proves the rule being when he has agreed to peace in order to consolidate gains acquired through aggression that he initiated, as in the Crimea.
The best year in the history of the CPP was 2012. There were two winners that year and both represent positive qualities. Kofi Annan was the long term Secretary General of the United Nations and whatever you think about his accomplishments, few would quibble about whether he was well-intentioned. The other winner that year was Yuan Longping, who was primarily responsible for developing hybrid rice species that proved to be high-yielding, thereby ameliorating hunger in areas otherwise susceptible to famine.
Another seemingly laudable winner is Yi Cheng in 2013. My knowledge of this man is so limited that all I can say for certain is that he was President of the Buddhist Association of China. At a minimum, he is not known to have promoted violence, which cannot be said of most of the other winners.
The winner of the 2014 Confucius Peach Prize was Fidel Castro, the man who has done more than anyone in the last fifty years to ensure that Cuba remains mired in technological stagnation. He has solidified a Marxist regime by totalitarian means and in general overseen the impoverishment of a country that has the people and the resources to have a vibrant and prosperous economy. He has exported weapons and soldiers to such a large extent that awarding him a peace prize is tantamount to a joke.
But the worst winner, and it isn’t even close, is Robert Mugabe. Take the worst of Putin and Castro, throw in 40 or so years of indiscriminate death squads and massive persistent voting fraud and you have Robert Mugabe. Whatever good he ever symbolized (as the face of the movement to overturn white minority rule) has been eviscerated by his use of torture and murder as political weapons, his promotion of various wars with his neighbors, and the impoverishment of millions of Zimbabwians because of the misguidedness of his various land and other reforms.
I wish the Confucius Peach Prize well. It appears to be an attempt to highlight leaders who are exemplars of Confucian principles. Its success in doing so is spotty. Compared to the early winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, the first four of whom where known for their active engagement on behalf of peace movements (Frederic Passy, Jean Henry Dunant, Charles Albert Gobat, and Elie Ducommun), the first winners of the Confucius Peace Prize are, on average, not especially peaceful. Here’s to hoping that future winners better exemplify the ideals of Confucius.
p.s. The various factual statements in this post are courtesy of several different Wikipedia pages. I’m not an encyclopedia, but fortunately, I have ready access to one.