Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe awarded ‘China’s answer to the Nobel Peace Prize’

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has been awarded “China’s alternative” to the Nobel Peace Prize for what the prize committee called his inspired national leadership and service to pan-Africanism.

The 91-year-old Mugabe is the latest in a series of critics of the West who have received the Confucius Peace Prize, first awarded in 2010 amid Beijing’s anger and resentment over the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

The award was publicly announced on September 28 and reported by Chinese edition of the Global Times the next day. But the story attracted renewed attention by foreign media and went viral after a story published on Quartz.com Wednesday.

Mugabe has “overcome difficulties of all kinds and has strongly committed himself to constructing his nation’s political and economic order, while strongly supporting pan-Africanism and African independence,” the committee said in announcing the award.

Prior recipients of the prize, granted by a non-governmental committee composed mainly of scholars, include former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Russian President Vladimir Putin. None has come to claim the prize in person.

The award was hastily launched by a group of mainland academics with some official backing in 2010. It came after a decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident Chinese writer Liu.