China Warns Nobel Committee
Beijing is worried that a Chinese dissident will win the Nobel Peace Prize when it's awarded tomorrow, a move that would mar China's 50th anniversary of communist rule.
China voiced its concerns to Norway after the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet interpreted remarks by Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad as a hint that a Chinese human rights activist would win the award, which will be announced Friday.
"That was a misunderstanding about what was said," Lundestad told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The Oslo-based peace prize committee refuses comment on possible winners. The committee did confirm that this year there were 136 candidates.
Speculation that the winner would be a Chinese dissident, such as Wei Jingsheng or Wang Dan, led to a recent flood of diplomatic contacts.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue today called the two criminals who had plotted to overthrow the government.
"A handful of people in the West went so far as to nominate persons like this to be candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. This is flagrant interference in China's internal affairs and makes a mockery of the prize," she said.
"If these people win the prize, that is unacceptable to the Chinese people and the Chinese government," she added.
"They gave a very serious warning against giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident or to Taiwan's president," Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ingvard Havnen said in a telephone interview. Nevertheless, he stressed the five-member Nobel committee works independently, and Norway cannot influence its decisions.
Such a prize would be a slap to China, often criticized for human rights abuses. China reacted furiously when the 1989 Nobel Prize went to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, which was invaded by Chinese troops in 1950.
Although Norwegian news media list Wei and Wang as possible laureates, most note several possible winners and say there is no clear favorite.
This is Nobel season. Last week, German novelist Günter Grass, whose darkly humorous works, such as The Tin Drum, resuscitated German literature "after decades of linguistic and moral destruction," was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for literature. He is to receive a cash prize of nearly $1 million.
On Monday, Dr. Guenter Blobel of The Rockefeller University in New York won the Nobel Prize for medicine for protein research that shed new light on diseases including cystic fibrosis and early development of kidney stones.
Dutch scientists Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus J.G. Veltman won the 1999 Nobel Prize for physics Tuesday for their theoretical work on the structure and motion of subatomic particles.
Also on Tuesday, an Egyptian-American scientist, Ahmed Zewail of Cal Tech, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, or his work demonstrating that a rapid laser technique can observe the motion of atoms in a molecule as they occur during a chemical reaction.
And on Wednesday, Robert A. Mundell of Columbia University in New York won the Nobel Prize for economic sciences for his analysis of exchange rates and their effect on monetary policies.