The case against awards; Why the wrong person always wins

The author does not think highly of awards. In the beginning of the article, he seems to be skeptical about awards because of his past experience. The author finds fault in the awards he mentioned and explains his reasons for disliking them explicitly. As the article proceeds, the author delves into the human mentality of prize, and despite knowing how absurd the process of choosing the recipient for the award is, those people who criticize the final outcome of the award are those that really care about it.

The author is strongly against the process of choosing the awards, and hopes that the criterion of choosing the winner should be fair but he does not elaborate further on how this may go about. While the author may seem appalled and irate by the way the awards are given, he is the very person he described as “those most convinced that, sat the Oscars do a horrible job of rating films are the very people who cling to their emotional investment in the outcome.”

For Putin, a Peace Prize for a Decision to Go to War

I did a double take when I first read the title. A Peace Prize for deciding to go to war? Is this a Chinese method of improving relations with Russia (or just Putin)? The Chinese committee awarded this year's Confucius Peace Prize honoured the winner, Vladimir V. Putin, prime minister of Russia, for his decision to go to war with Chechnya.

Russian students Dakhova and Ostasheako hold the Chinese Confucius Peace Prize after accepting it on behalf of Putin in Beijing Photo: REUTERS

Even the author (Edward Wong) seemed a little doubtful about this. Where did this dubious award come from? Wong mentioned how the organising committee awarded "what they call their" peace prize and there was "curiously little reporting" in the Chinese media about the award. In fact, the news of how Putin received the Confucius Peace Prize was hyped up through Twitter. The previous winner of this prize, Lien Chan, a Taiwanese Politician, had never heard of the award, and his prize was curiously given to "a young girl with no relation" to him.

On the committee that gives out this award sits a self-acclaimed descendant from Confucius' lineage and a professor at Peking University, Kong Qingdong, who is asked to leave because of his rude actions towards a journalist. Another member of the committee who had left the group is starting another award with the Americans. All these strange characters on the judging committee truly reflects the kind of award the Confucius Peace Prize.

Apparently this publicised (or rather the lack of) Confucius Peace Prize is a phony award presented to Putin with the borrowed namesake of the Culture Ministry. The original award was supposedly the Confucius World Peace Prize. After this incident, the Culture Ministry decided not to give out the Confucius World Peace Prize award. Perhaps they decided not be embarrassed any further...