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China will hand out its own, very first peace prize, one day before the imprisoned activist Liu Xiaobo is honoured in Oslo with the Nobel Prize. The first recipient of the prize will be Lien Chan, the former vice president of Taiwan. The move by a group of Chinese professors to launch the Confucius Peace Prize comes amid continuing fury from Beijing at the decision by the Nobel committee to make Liu, 54, its first mainland Chinese laureate, The Telegraph reports. According to the Confucius Prize web site, it is a greater honour than the Nobel, because China has more than one billion citizens, while Norway is tiny and its committee "could be inevitably biased and fallacious". Beijing has continued to attack the Nobel Prize labelling the Nobel committee as "clowns" staging an anti-China farce. At least 19 countries have pulled out of the Nobel ceremony after Chinese pressure and threats against them that there would be "consequences" if they took part.

China launches its own peace prize