BEIJING, Feb. 15 (Kyodo) - China lashed out Thursday at the reported nomination of Falun Gong leader Li Hongzhi for the Nobel Peace Prize.
''It is clear to everyone that Falun Gong is an evil cult,'' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao told a regular news conference in Beijing.
The candidacy of Li or the Falun Gong group, which is banned in mainland China, would ''make a great mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize,'' he said.
The prize committee has a policy against revealing candidates and conducts its selection process in secret until the recipient is announced in October.
However, past laureates, professors and legislators qualified to nominate candidates often declare their favorites independently.
On Tuesday in Oslo, committee secretary Geir Lundestad told reporters that 98 individuals and 28 organizations have been nominated for the prize but that the list may grow if more nominations arrive postmarked by the Feb. 1 deadline.
Nomination alone does not make a person or organization a serious candidate for the prize, he pointed out.
Other ''nominees,'' announced independently, include U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan, Japanese historian and antiwar educational activist Saburo Ienaga, and the International Red Cross, whose founder won the first Nobel Peace Prize 100 years ago.
To confer the prize on Li, who lives in New York, would amount to ''using the prize for ulterior political motives'' to which ''we are resolutely opposed,'' Zhu told the news conference.
His words echo those with which the spokesman dismissed last year's award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to exiled Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian.
That was a clear demonstration that the prize had ''been used for ulterior political purposes, and it is not worth commenting on,'' Zhu said in a statement last October.
AP-NY-02-15-01 0625EST
Copyright 2001 The Kyodo News Service.