China silently seethes over dissident's Nobel Peace Prize
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
More than 12 hours after the announcement that an imprisoned dissident in China had won the Nobel Peace Prize, China's domestic news media on Saturday remained silent on the subject, underscoring the Communist Party's rage at so public a challenge to its authoritarian rule.
The central government in Beijing blocked Chinese-language Internet searches and cell phone text messages about the award to Liu Xiaobo, who is the first resident Chinese citizen honored with what is arguably the world's most prestigious prize.
How far China will go in the days ahead to ensure that most of its citizens never learn about Liu's award remained an open question. There were reports on Twitter, accessible from China only with special software, that several Chinese who'd tried to celebrate the award in Beijing and Shanghai were carted off by police.
The award strikes at the heart of the way Beijing's rulers usually handle the country's small numbers of dissidents - monitoring, harassing, detaining and censoring them until the vast majority of Chinese don't realize they even exist.
The Nobel committee said that by conferring the honor upon Liu, it intended to call attention to China's human rights problems. Liu, a 54-year-old former university professor, has spent years in and out of Chinese jails for his dissident activities, beginning with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.more...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/08/101832/china-denounces-dissidents-nobel.html