When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, now serving an 11-year jail sentence, I could not help but think of a small, inspiring museum in Oslo called the Museum of Resistance. It tells the story of Norway’s courageous citizens who refused to buckle under to Nazi Germany. Today, the Norwegians did themselves proud again. The Norwegian Nobel Committee refused to be intimidated by the communist Chinese government’s effort to dissuade it from awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo by threatening diplomatic and, one imagines, trade retaliation. 

Liu is a bookish, chain-smoking hero.  (I met him and his wife Liu Xia in August 2007 in his apartment and again at a restaurant for lunch where he told a joke about Jiang Zemin and ladies undergarments that broke up our fellow diners, but apparently did not translate well.)