Confucius Peace Prize Snubs Nose at Nobel Peace Prize, in Battle of Ideas!

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Confucius Prize could be weapon in battle of ideas

By Liu Zhiqin

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee won Liu Xiaobo while losing the trust of 1.3 billion Chinese people. They support a criminal while creating 1.3 billion "dissidents" that are dissatisfied with the Nobel Committee, which is definitely a bad decision.

However, the Chinese people's discontent or questioning will not change the prejudice of the proud and stubborn Noble Prize Committee members.

On the contrary, China's opposition could inspire their pride as heroes or sense of accomplishment because it has become the mind-set of the current Westerners that they will oppose whatever China supports and support whatever China opposes. In order to make them change their mind-set, more appropriate ways need to be adopted.

We often stress the need to fight for the right to speak. In fact, this is a good opportunity and China's civil society should consider setting up a "Confucius Peace Prize," launching the evaluation and selection and finding the real Peace Prize winners from all over the world.

This is the best opportunity for the Chinese to declare China's view in peace and human rights to the world.
Through such evaluation and selection, people around the world can have the most direct, sensible and comparative opportunity to observe, analyze and understand the Eastern and Western values.

With China's growing economic strength, Chinese culture and ideas will also be spread.

With the establishment of "Confucius Institutes" all over the world, the ideas of Confucius are understood and accepted by more and more people throughout the world.

Against such a good background, the establishment of a worldwide "Confucius Peace Prize" will be welcome by people in different countries. Of course, this step needs the long-term accumulation of different sides, but it is essential for China to step into the world.

While carrying out "Confucius Peace Prize" selection, China can learn more things from the world, especially how people of different cultures, different religions and different political systems think, build their nations and enable their people to live and work in peace.

We should also teach Westerners how to cultivate their own spirits and kindly treat people that have different national values and lifestyles. Only in this way could China and the West really work together to create a harmonious and tolerant world.

In a recent editorial, the Global Times looked "forward to the Nobel Prize Committee that really belongs to the world." I am afraid this good wish will not be realized. At least we should not rely on the members of the Peace Prize Committee. We have suffered too much loss already.

We would rather do something within our power than expect others to change, such as establishing through civil society a "Confucius Peace Prize" Committee and inviting internationally renowned persons to join. Thus the world will surely look at China with new eyes!

The author is the Beijing chief representative of Zurich Bank, Switzerland. globaltimesopinion@ yahoo.com

Confucius Peace Prize Snubs Nose at Nobel Peace Prize Honors

 Confucius Peace Prize - just three weeks after the idea for the honors were first publicly mentioned, isnow a reality. The Confucius Peace Prize is the Chinese snub-nosed attempt to cobble together its own peace prize - and the Confucius Peace Prize will be awarded the day before the Nobel Committee honors an imprisoned Chinese dissident in a move that has enraged Beijing.

Since Liu Xiaobo's selection, China has vilified the 54-year-old democracy advocate, called the choice an effort by the West to contain its rise, disparaged his supporters as "clowns," and launched a campaign to persuade countries not to attend Friday's ceremony in Oslo.

The government is also preventing Liu - who is serving an 11-year sentence for co-authoring a bold appeal for political reforms in the Communist country - and his family members from attending.

Amid the flurry of action came a commentary published on Nov. 17 in a Communist Party-approved tabloid that suggested China create its own award - the "Confucius Peace Prize" - to counter the choice of Liu.

Three weeks later, The Associated Press has learned, China is doing just that.

Named after the famed philosopher, the new prize was created to "interpret the viewpoints of peace of (the) Chinese (people)," the awards committee said in a statement it released to the AP on Tuesday.

Awards committee chairman Tan Changliu said his group was not an official government body, but acknowledged that it worked closely with the Ministry of Culture.

He declined to give specifics about the committee, when it was created and how the five judges were chosen, saying it would be disclosed later.

The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having "built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday because she knew nothing about the prize.

Lien was chosen from among eight nominees - some of whom are regularly mentioned for, or have already won, that other peace prize: including billionaire Bill Gates, former South African President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

While China regularly disparages the Dalai Lama, the religion's spiritual leader, the current Panchen Lama is a 20-year-old who was hand-picked by Beijing. The original boy named by the Dalai Lama has disappeared.

"We should not compete, we should not confront the Nobel Prize, but we should try to set up another standard," said Liu Zhiqin, the Beijing businessman who suggested the prize in The Global Times.

"The Nobel prize is not a holy thing that we cannot doubt or question. Everyone has a right to dispute whether it's right or wrong." Liu said in the phone interview that he was not involved in setting up the new awards.

Tan, who leads the awards committee, acknowledged that the new prize, which comes with a purse of 100,000 yuan ($15,000), doesn't have international recognition: "It needs to grow gradually, and we hope people will believe the award is of global significance."

China is not the first nation to be rankled by a Nobel Peace Prize. During Nazi Germany era, Adolf Hitler created the German National Prize for Art and Science in 1937 as a replacement for the Nobel. He had forbidden German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky from accepting his Nobel awarded in 1935.

This year, China's clampdown against Liu and his supporters means the Nobel medal and money won't be handed out for the first time since that period. Nobel officials say the prestigious $1.4 million award can be collected only by the laureate or close family members.

In the meantime, China is chipping away at the Nobel: It succeeded in persuading 18 other countries to boycott the upcoming ceremony, including longtime allies like Pakistan, Venezuela and Cuba as well as business partners Saudi Arabia and Iran, Nobel officials said Tuesday.

Beijing sharpened its denunciations, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu accusing the Nobel committee of "orchestrating an anti-China farce by themselves."

"We are not changing because of interference by a few clowns and we will not change our path," she said.
But Beijing's hastily arranged efforts to provide a distraction to the Nobel ceremony are counterproductive, said Oxford University China scholar Steve Tsang.

"The whole thing is too obviously being rushed to counter the Nobel Prize to Liu Xiaobo. People will see it for what it is. That being the case, it's not going to be very credible," he said.

If anything, China's heavy-handed reactions in the wake of the announcement, which include putting Liu's wife and other supporters under house arrest and barring dozens of activists from traveling to Oslo, "simply give the rest of the world the impression that human rights is really in trouble in China," he said.

American Imperialism! US declared financial war to the world Prof Dr Michael Hudson

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US declared financial war to the world Prof Dr Michael Hudson 

Asian American Men Face Discrimination in Job Market

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Source: American Sociological Association (ASA)

Research Exposes Racial Discrimination Against Asian American Men in Job Market

Newswise — A new study by a University of Kansas sociologist shows that U.S. employers fail to pay Asian American men as much as similarly qualified white men.

“The most striking result is that native-born Asian Americans — who were born in the U.S. and speak English perfectly — their income is 8 percent lower than whites after controlling for their college majors, their places of residence and their level of education,” said ChangHwan Kim, an assistant professor of sociology at KU, who led the study.

Full results of the study — “Have Asian American Men Achieved Labor Market Parity with White Men?” — appear in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.

According to Kim, who co-authored the study with Arthur Sakamoto of the University of Texas at Austin, the findings show that the U.S. falls short of the goal of a colorblind society.

“As an individual, you can reach as high as president,” said Kim. “But as an ethnic group, no group has reached full parity with whites. That’s the current status of racial equality in the United States.”

Kim and Sakamoto combed data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates to investigate earnings — numbers that have not been used previously in research on Asian Americans.

Among their other notable findings:

- First-generation Asian American men, who were born and completed their education overseas, earn 29 percent less than white men in the U.S.

- 1.25-generation Asian American men, those who earned their highest degree at a U.S. institution, but were born and previously educated in a foreign country, had incomes 14 percent lower than those of white men.

- The only group to have achieved earnings parity with white men is 1.5-generation Asian American men. Though foreign-born, these men came to the U.S. as children, so therefore speak perfect English and have U.S. educations.

Kim said that 1.5-generation Asian American men could benefit economically from their parents’ immigrant work ethic: “They see their parents struggle, and they understand that their achievement in the United States is actually their parents’ achievement. It’s not their own goal, it’s the goal for their whole family,” he said. “They actually have a burden of success.”

Despite the disparity in income levels, Asian American men are less disadvantaged than before the Civil Rights era in the U.S. Advancement towards an end to racial discrimination continues, according to Kim.

“The 8 percent difference is large, but it is small compared to previous Asian American generations,” Kim said. “Previous generations had income levels much lower, so in this sense we’ve made progress.”

About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA’s flagship journal.

The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA’s Media Relations and Public Affairs Officer, at (202) 527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.

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Google Misses You

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Facebook has corralled 500 million people into an exclusive club that's out of Google's reach. There's no way Google will stand for that.

• Technology Review By Paul Boutin

Credit: Peter Arkle

Things Reviewed: Google's social-networking efforts
Facebook

  

Last winter, Google made a run at Facebook and fell flat, fast. Google Buzz, the social network it tried to build around its popular Gmail service, failed to live up to its name: it drew only a small fraction of Gmail's more than 100 million users, and it prompted a privacy scare and a lawsuit.

But Google didn't give up. Instead, the company is trying again, on a much bigger scale. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying Web companies and luring talent in hopes of stopping, or at least slowing, Facebook's dominance in online social networking. (The project has been dubbed "Google Me," according to people in Silicon Valley who claim inside knowledge.)

Why would Google--the Web's most profitable public company, an organization that has had no difficulty increasing its commissions from online advertising--have it in for Facebook?

It's this simple: Facebook, from the start, has locked Google's Web-crawling robots away from its exclusive club of 500 million members. Just try to search for yourself or anyone else who you know is on Facebook. Google probably won't deliver more than a skimpy profile page whose goal seems to be to get you intrigued enough to sign up for Facebook yourself.

Facebook lets members reconfigure their accounts to open their photos and personal information to Google, but it prevents search engines from indexing individual status updates, the site's core content.

Top 10 Scientific Discoveries

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	But don't worry; it's very, very slow. Yon won't see it disappear anytime soon. Scientists found that cracks in the moon's crust has cooled and shrunk over the last billion years or so.  Scientists have created a material to make fabrics that manipulate visible light to shield objects from view. However, Harry Potter fans may have to wait a long while before the storied cloak becomes reality. You can't imagine any object older than this. Astronomers have spotted the oldest galaxy ever seen, one born 13 billion years ago and just 600 million years after the Big Bang. Time for a real antimatter bomb like the one in Dan Brown's sci-fi thriller Angels and Demons? Hardly. Scientists have been able to trap individual antimatter atoms for only a bit more than one-tenth of a second. To a particle physicist, that's a pretty long time.   Is it a biological gang fight? Hard to define. But Chinese expert Liu Chang wants to create a virus that could kill HIV, the virus causing the deadly AIDS. How could that be possible?

	Astronomers may have lucked into the ultimate in cosmic baby pictures: a voracious black hole fresh from its violent birth. Just how old is the newborn? About 30 years into forming.
	Dark-averse ladies, now you may want to turn off the lights at night, not just to be green. A new study said exposure to too much light at night may lead to obesity, even without changing physical activity or eating more food. Researchers have found that atrazine, one of the most commonly used weed killers, can turn male frogs into females. Atrazine is known to disrupt hormones, leading to the decline of amphibians such as frogs around the world. Hope you are not shuddering at the news that Chinese scientists have demonstrated how arsenic fights blood cancer by targeting and killing specific proteins that keep the disease alive. You don't want to be, sorry, an idiot, do you? Then believe it or not, here is one more reason to kick the habit of smoking. A study finds that cigarette smokers have lower IQs than non-smokers, and the more they smoke, the lower their IQ. Newscribe : get free news in real time

China to lead world in innovation by 2020: survey

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LONDON - China is set to become the world's most important centre for innovation by 2020, overtaking both the United States and Japan, according to a public opinion survey to be published on Monday.

Related readings:  China welcomes int'l technological cooperation in new energy sector  A mind for innovation  Solid basis for innovation

China is already the world's second-largest economy, after establishing itself as the global workshop for manufacturing. Now it wants to move up the value chain by leading in invention as well.

Today, the United States ranks as the world's most innovative country, with 30 percent of people surveyed taking that view, followed by Japan on 25 percent and China on 14 percent.

Fast-forward 10 years, however, and 27 percent of people think China will be top dog, followed by India with 17 percent, the United States 14 percent and Japan 12 percent, according to the survey of 6,000 people in six countries done by drugmaker AstraZeneca.

The shift is not because the United States is doing less science and technology, but because countries like China and India are doing more - a fact reflected in a spike-up in successful Asian research efforts in recent years.

A study last month from Thomson Reuters showed China was now the second-largest producer of scientific papers, after the United States, and research and development (R&D) spending by Asian nations as a group in 2008 was $387 billion, compared with $384 billion in the United States and $280 billion in Europe.

Asian confidence

Working out just how fast the world's new emerging market giants are developing their know-how is critical to many technology-focused companies in the West, as they seek to redeploy R&D resources.

The pharmaceutical industry, in particular, has been anxious to tap into China's science base and many companies, including AstraZeneca, have established Chinese centres as they try to reignite R&D productivity in laboratories at home.

The survey across Britain, the United States, Sweden, Japan, India and China found a strong sense of optimism amongst people living in China and India, in contrast to relative pessimism in the developed Western economies.

More than half of those in China and India thought their home countries would be the most innovative in the world by 2020, while just one in 20 Britons thought Britain would be able to claim this title.

There was an notable east-west divide in views of what had been the most important scientific breakthroughs. People in Asia put communications and computing top, while US and European respondents placed equal importance on the invention of vaccines and antibiotics, the survey

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U.S. chip manufacturing in the age of the iPad

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Behind the fly-off-the-shelf popularity of products like Apple's iPad and iPhone are hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs--mostly overseas. Is it possible to create more of those jobs here in the U.S. to combat chronically high levels of unemployment?

Andy Grove's Stanford class examined the state of manufacturing in the U.S.

(Credit: Intel)

Personal computing is moving rapidly beyond the laptop. And there's no better example than Apple, whose most popular products are now the iPhone and the iPad. The surging demand for anything Apple is causing a seismic shift in chip manufacturing to Asia, the hotbed of new silicon ecosystems. Though companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell also play a role, they are still primarily Intel-centric PC makers, while Apple is morphing into a maker of smartphones and tablets, which is creating the alternative non-Intel silicon manufacturing ecosystems overseas. Thus the focus on Apple.

So, is there anything a U.S. gadget supplier like Apple can--or should--do to help maintain a chip manufacturing base in the U.S.? Seeking an answer to that question I recently sat in on a Stanford University class taught by Andy Grove, the former Intel chief executive, and talked to Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering.

My premise was pretty simple. The tablet and high-end smartphone are pushing chip manufacturing outside of the U.S. and away from PC chip stalwart Intel, which has always maintained a large manufacturing base here. My question: If all things are more or less equal technologically, is it a feasible business decision to source silicon from companies, when possible, that have manufacturing bases--and create jobs--in the U.S.?

One of the most prominent examples is Micron Technology and its flash memory chip joint venture with Intel, IM Flash Technologies. Micron is a scrappy Boise, Idaho-based chip manufacturer that survived Japanese chipmakers' takeover of the lion's share of the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) business in the 1980s and is still alive and kicking despite Asia's--primarily South Korea's and Japan's--preeminence in the memory chip business now.

Toshiba, in particular, is emerging as a strong presence in flash memory now. Thanks, increasingly, to Apple. In fact, to date, a sizable chunk of the flash that went into the iPhone and iPad was sourced from Toshiba. Most pointedly, Apple announced publicly in 2009 that it had cut a $500 million deal with Toshiba to supply flash.

And flash is now prominent in the new MacBook Air, which is offered with 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB flash drives. In the popular 11.6-inch MacBook Air, for example, an iFixit teardown reveals a 64GB solid-state drive supplied by Toshiba.
Cost breakdowns by firms such as iSuppli show that the flash memory component of iPads and iPhones, as percentage of a total bill of materials, ranks very high and is--depending on whether it's 16GB or 64GB--sometimes the largest single component in terms of cost.

Is this business that Micron and/or Intel--who manufacture flash at facilities in Lehi, Utah, and Manassas, Va.,--could get a bigger piece of? That's a business decision Apple has to make. But my point is that the opportunity to make that choice could vanish if trends continue.

U.S. manufacturing clusters
Grove's Standford University graduate business class focused in part on "industry clusters," which are described as "a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and associated institutions focused on a particular field (i.e., Silicon Valley)," in the class handout. And one of the questions for open discussion was, "How do we make Silicon Valley an industry cluster for manufacturing technology?"

I didn't hear any good answers to that question. What I did hear were more needling questions such as, "Can you control what you don't produce? We say, no." Or statements about America's lack of focus on maintaining a manufacturing base, such as, "America is not fighting right now, at least not very hard." And, of course, the usual warnings about major disincentives: the stratospherically high U.S. corporate tax rate--a point Intel's current CEO Paul Otellini is not bashful about making--was cited as second only to Japan's at 40 percent.

The corporate tax rate is an important issue because, when it's globally competitive--that is, low--it draws business to the U.S. naturally, in the spirit of Adam Smith's oft-quoted maxim of the Invisible Hand. The U.S. government can't plan a manufacturing base into existence--capitalism doesn't work that way--but a country can do everything possible to make the conditions favorable.

Grove asserts that the U.S. government should be aggressive on all fronts to keep the international playing field as level as possible. "Is China following WTO (World Trade Organization) rules? Should you be worried about being accused of protectionism?"--Grove asked the class. He was posing questions that seemed to imply that the U.S. needs to do more to help itself.

And product giants like Apple can also do their share by turning to existing U.S. sources. "Yes, let's put pressure on Apple. If Apple bought flash from Intel or Micron, that's a great example," said Duke University's Wadhwa.

But not all manufacturing is created equal. "The vast majority of manufacturing is destructive to the environment. Like paint and toy manufacturing. And if you build more manufacturing plants here like Foxconn--which build Apple's iPhone in China--Americans wouldn't want to do those jobs. It's mindless, grunt work," he said.

Wadhwa continued. "Germany (for example) is all very high-level manufacturing. It's very high-level technology products and they pay very high salaries. It's not grunt work. By all means let's get high-end high-tech manufacturing in the U.S. Flash memory is a good example. Manufacturing the most critical ingredients of solar technology is a good example. And clean-tech manufacturing," he said.

Some manufacturing, surprisingly, is coming back to the U.S. The Stanford class cited cases of "re-shoring" of manufacturing by General Electric, Caterpillar, and Ford. In some cases, unforeseen complications make manufacturing abroad simply impractical. And China's cost of living is rising too, which will work against low-cost manufacturing in that country in the future.

Let's hope that the U.S. remains as hospitable as possible to high-quality high-tech manufacturing jobs and that companies like Apple do their share to source from U.S.-based suppliers when possible.

Brooke Crothers
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