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China has lashed out at the Nobel Peace Prize committee after it awarded this year's prize to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who has long called for political reform in the country.
The Chinese government's reaction was swift and unequivocal. A statement on the Chinese Foreign Ministry's website called the award "an obscenity" that goes against the aims of the award. It warned the award also will hurt China's relations with Norway, the country where the Nobel Committee is based.
The Chinese government's dismay had been expressed in recent days, in less harsh language, by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu.
Jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, sparking a furious backlash from Beijing and renewed Western calls for his immediate release. The 54-year-old writer and university professor was honoured "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China," Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in his announcement. "The Norwegian Nobel Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace," he added. Liu was sentenced last December to 11 years behind bars for subversion, following the 2008 release of "Charter 08", a manifesto for reform signed by more than 300 Chinese intellectuals, academics and writers. He is one of only three people to win the Peace Prize while in prison, after 1991 laureate Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a Nazi jail when he won in 1935. Following Friday's announcement, US President Barack Obama, the 2009 Peace laureate, called for Liu's release, as did a number of European governments and human rights groups.
The first citizen of the People's Republic of China to win a Nobel prize was awarded the honor Friday for advocating greater freedom in his country. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement that Liu Xiaobo - a prickly, chain-smoking dissident of moderate views - deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because of "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Liu, 54, who is nearing the end of the first year of an 11-year prison sentence for subversion, becomes only the second person to win the peace prize while incarcerated, following German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who won it in 1935 while jailed by the Nazis.