When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, the authoritarians in Beijing responded in their typical, iron-fisted fashion. The Foreign Ministry immediately called the award “blasphemy” and a “desecration,” and characterized Liu as a common criminal. They cancelled official meetings with the Norwegian government and accused countries that lauded Liu’s selection of ignorance, jealousy and malice toward China’s success. They also placed Liu’s wife, Liu Jia, under house arrest, and detained several Chinese who attempted to celebrate the award. Other supporters of Liu have gone missing at the hands of state security, including Ding Zilin (founder the Tiananmen Mothers, an advocacy group that seeks an official reappraisal of the 1989 massacre), Ding’s husband, and dissident writer Jiang Qisheng, a close friend of Liu’s. 

After its initial broadsides, Beijing instituted a comprehensive effort to blackout domestic coverage of, and discussion about, the prize. The “Ministry of Truth,” Chinese netizens’ Orwellian name for the cohort of agencies involved in managing the government’s multi-layered censorship regime, moved quickly to warn all news outlets and Internet content and service providers to block any reference to Liu or his prize. Searches for Liu’s name, the word “Nobel” and, according to a source who monitors censorship on Chinese user-generated content and micro-blogging sites, even the Chinese characters for the word “peace” brought up the censors’ familiar warning that one had stumbled upon forbidden content.