Visiting New York Times snailpaper writer Thomas Friedman said that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be honored someday soon by the Nobel committee for promoting peace ....

NOBLE DIPLOMACY: Visiting New York Times snailpaper writer Thomas Friedman said that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be honored someday soon by the Nobel committee for promoting peace ....

When New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman visited ROC Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) in Taipei recently, while visiting Taiwan during a three-day lecture tour/book-signing campaign he made the bold suggestion that the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize should go to China and Taiwan for maintaining peace across the Taiwan Straits for dozens of years without the so-called Asian flashpoint flashing or exploding.
ROC Government Information Office Deputy Minister Alice Wang (王麗珠), relaying their conversation to reporters afterwards, said Tom Friedman was curious to understand why Taiwan, which he said was regarded as one of the flashpoints in the world 13 years ago, could maintain peace with communist China over the years without much shuttle diplomacy and US intervention.

Friedman was quoted as saying in a report in the Taipei Times [on January 12, 2009] that people on both sides of Strait should have been honored with the Nobel Prize last year rather than U.S. President Barack Obama.Friedman said that he considered the way that deomocratic Taiwan and communist China created peace, which he said was to build a supply chain economically on the basis of complementary needs, was a better approach to peace as it could last for a longer time.

So: will Thomas Friedman nominate Hu Jintao and Ma Ying-Jeou for next fall's NOBEL PEACE PRIZE? Stay tuned. Finely tuned. This story has legs, as they say in Oslo.