[3] Despite an attempt by China's Ministry of Culture to ban the prize[4][5][6] in September 2011, the original organizers re-established in Hong Kong as the "China International Peace Research Center", awarding the prize to Vladimir Putin in November 2011,[7][8][9] to Kofi Annan and Yuan Longping in 2012,[10] to Fidel Castro in 2014,[11] to Robert Mugabe in 2015,[12] and Hun Sen in 2017.
[1][14][19] China's Minister of Culture talked to the United Daily News in Taipei and stated they had never heard of this prize for Lien Chan until there was newspaper coverage.
[20] The Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that the letter issued by the committee to Lien Chan did not have the Ministry of Culture's official seal.
[20] The award, consisting of a small sculpture and a bundle of banknotes, was collected by a young girl in front of an audience of some 100 journalists.
[9] The Association of Chinese Indigenous Arts was quick to blame a "rogue department" for the debacle surrounding the award.
Other contenders were Angela Merkel, Bill Gates, Jacob Zuma, Kofi Annan, Yuan Longping, Gyaincain Norbu (one of the Panchen Lamas), and Soong Chu-yu.
According to the committee, Putin's "Iron hand and toughness revealed in this war impressed the Russians a lot, and he was regarded to be capable of bringing safety and stability to Russia."
[24] The shortlist for the 2012 award consisted of previous nominees Kofi Annan, Bill Gates, agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, and Gyancain Norbu, as well as Ban Ki-moon, Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, Chinese philosopher Tang Yijie, and Wang Dingguo, the last surviving female participant in Mao Zedong's Long March.
[10][23] Zen master Yicheng was awarded the 2013 prize for his work as chairman of the Buddhist Association of China and his contribution for Chinese Buddhism.
[11] Nominated for the award in 2015 were the Chinese Taoist Association, Ban Ki-moon, former Japanese prime ministers Yasuo Fukuda and Tomiichi Murayama, Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev, Bill Gates, Chinese-American politician Anna Chennault, South Korean president Park Geun-hye, Hsing Yun of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist movement in Taiwan, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
[citation needed] Candidates for the 2017 prize were Hun Sen, Gyaincain Norbu, Rodrigo Duterte, Bashar al-Assad, Angela Merkel, Hsing Yun, the Chinese Taoist Association, Xuecheng, Pope Francis, and Yancan.
[13] The Confucius Peace Prize's first winner, Lien Chan, claimed he had not officially heard that he had won; an aide said that they had only received "secondhand information from journalists".
[19] Officials from the Taiwanese government are reported to have found the award of the Confucius Peace Prize to Lien Chan "amusing".
[39] In 2015, Ankit Panda, editor-at-large of The Diplomat, wrote a column regarding Western responses to the award of the Confucius Peace Prize to Robert Mugabe, saying, "[T]he government of the People’s Republic of China hasn’t quite responded to perceived Western affronts with the sort of pettiness that the Confucian Peace Prize represents.