BEIJING — A new Asian prize that pays more than the Nobel Prize will launch next year, joining an expanding list of cash-rich awards in the region as prosperity and philanthropy grow. Yet one prize – China’s Confucius Peace Prize – set up in 2010 in apparently outraged response to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo – seems to be unable to establish itself. In fact, as one commentator wrote in the state-run Global Times late last year, “the award has been widely mocked.”
That is unlikely to happen to the Tang Prize, set up by Samuel Yin, a multibillionaire from Taiwan who has pledged to give away nearly all his wealth.
The new prize will award $1.7 million every other year to winners in each of four fields: sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, Sinology, and the rule of law, Science magazine reported. The money will be divided into two parts, an award and a research fund, with the bulk going to the award.
Mr. Yin, head of Ruentex Group, is Taiwan’s seventh-richest person, according to Forbes magazine, worth about $3.1 billion from diversified investments including a hypermarket, insurance and Taiwanese real estate.
The award, announced on Monday in Taipei, “lengthens the list of rich science prizes funded by Asian philanthropists,” Science magazine reported. “Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong media mogul, in 2002 established the Shaw Prize, which annually confers $1 million for work in astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.”
“Three other major science prizes in Japan hand out about $550,000 to each winner annually,” including the Kyoto Prize (technology, basic science, arts and philosophy), the Japan Prize (environment, energy and infrastructure, and health care and medical technology), and the Blue Planet Prize (environmental research.)
Mr. Yin hopes the new prize will “encourage more research that is beneficial to the world and humankind, promote Chinese culture, and make the world a better place,” according to a press release.
Academia Sinica, which oversees Taiwan’s premier research labs, will be responsible for the nomination and selection process, Science reported. The prize is named after the Tang dynasty, a high point in Chinese civilization and multiculturalism.
Yet if awarding prizes for science is relatively straightforward, awarding prizes for peace is far more controversial, as the ongoing debacle with the Confucius Peace Prize shows.
Its travails have been widely reported, with this story in Time magazine summing up some of the major issues, which include “wacky” nominee lists and a controversial founder, the Peking University professor and staunch Chinese ultra-nationalist Kong Qingdong, who claims to be a 73rd-generation offspring of Confucius himself and who early last year caused a storm of controversy after calling Hong Kong people “dogs” and “thieves.”
Time said the prize, awarded by “an obscure mainland group” (the China International Peace Research Center) was “a clumsy attempt to divert attention from the fact that the world’s most famous peace prize had just gone to a jailed Chinese dissident.” The government has reportedly dissociated itself from the award.
In 2010 and 2011 it was awarded, respectively, to a Taiwanese politician, Lien Chan, and to the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin. Neither showed up for the ceremony.
Instead, wrote Xue Lei, a research fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies in the Global Times, “the award was given to a terrified small child” who was supposed to represent Mr. Lien, and to “two Russian hotties, supposed to represent Russian President Vladimir Putin,” all of which “just added to the entertainment value.”
Now, it appears to be slipping below the radar altogether.
Only a determined search of the Chinese internet showed up a report, dated Dec. 28, that suggested that last year a prize committee of 39 “experts and scholars” had in fact picked two winners for the 2012 award: Yuan Longping, known as “the father of hybrid rice,” a well-known scientist who for decades has worked to increase rice yields; and Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations.
But as the report on clubkdnet, an online chat forum, said, “there are no photographs on the internet of them receiving their prizes.”
