Brushing aside questions over its political motives, a Chinese group awarded its own "peace prize" Thursday, just a day before the Nobel Committee was set to honour jailed China dissident Liu Xiaobo.

The inaugural Confucius Peace Prize was awarded to former Taiwan vice-president Lien Chan at a chaotic press conference held by a handful of Chinese university professors.

Lien's own office has denied all knowledge of the award, but that did not stop the "prize jury" presenting it on his behalf to a pony-tailed young Chinese girl.

"For Peace!" jury member Yang Disheng said with a flourish as he handed a glass trophy to the girl, who looked somewhat frightened amid a hail of camera flashes.

The prize comes one day before the Nobel ceremony in Oslo honouring Liu, a 54-year-old dissident writer who has called for political reform in one-party China and who was announced as peace laureate in October.

A deeply embarrassed Chinese government has responded furiously, threatening repercussions on ties with Norway, lashing the Nobel committee as "clowns" and pressuring countries to avoid the ceremony.

Members of the prize jury denied links to China's government or suggestions their prize was in response to Liu's award.

"The more peace prizes we can have in the world, the better. How can this be bad?" said Yang, identified by the jury as a professor of "ideology and culture" at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

But the press conference soon took a farcical turn when members were questioned about aspects of the award, such as its timing.

Jury chairman Tan Changliu, a philosophy professor at Beijing Normal University, said the award had been in the works for "a long time", but refused to provide specifics.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman declined comment on the rival prize.

Lien's office in Taiwan also declined comment to AFP, saying they had no knowledge of the award.

But Chinese poet Qiao Damo, one of the "candidates", told reporters the lack of any word from Lien represented "silent acceptance" of the prize, prompting laughter from assembled journalists.

If unaccepted, a purported 100,000 yuan (15,000 dollars) in prize money will be "donated", members said, giving no details on where it would go.

Liu was jailed in December 2009 for 11 years on subversion charges after co-authoring a petition advocating political reform and human rights protections in China.

Tan said "those three words were never uttered" in the jury's deliberations, referring to the Chinese characters for Liu's name.

But the prize's own literature expresses resentment towards Norway, home to the Nobel committee.

It said China, with its population of 1.3 billion people, "should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace", calling Norway "only a small country with a scarce land area and population".

Lien was a politically safe choice. He is an honorary chairman of Taiwan's Beijing-friendly ruling Kuomintang party.

Other "candidates" included South African democracy icon Nelson Mandela and former US president Jimmy Carter — both Nobel peace laureates.

Zhou Guidian, a jury member and Confucian scholar, said some past Nobel choices were appropriate, such as Mandela, but others were not.

He singled out last year's laureate US President Barack Obama, citing the continued US involvement in war-wracked Iraq.

"Some of the Nobel choices have been inappropriate. So we need to select a peace representative according to Chinese traditions, and Confucian pacifism," Zhou said.

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