"We find it difficult to forgive these foreigners who support (Liu's) views insulting the Chinese people," said Yan, a hardliner whose views closely mirror those of Chinese leaders.
China's retaliation seeks to exact real economic pain. According to the Norwegian Seafood Council, Norway's share of China's salmon market plunged from 92 percent in 2010 to 29 percent in the first half of this year. While the Norwegian salmon industry remains robust, operators are wary of what this portends as China's appetite for salmon grows.
Along with barriers on Norwegian salmon imports, Beijing has abandoned yearslong talks on a bilateral free trade agreement and excluded Norwegians from visa-free treatment on brief visits to China. Norwegian businesspeople, journalists and academics have been denied visas for unexplained reasons.
Similarly, economic exchanges with Britain were held up after David Cameron met last year with the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader, whom China reviles as a separatist. Those exchanges were restored only this month following London's assurances that Cameron had no further plans to meet the 78-year-old cleric.
China also was critical of Lithuania for hosting the Dalai Lama. Many other nations have suffered similarly for angering Beijing over issues such as Dalai Lama, human rights, territorial disputes and support for Beijing's rival Taiwan. Beijing banned Filipino bananas and disinvited the country's president to a regional trade meeting following a dispute over islands in the South China Sea.
Relations with Japan, always complicated by lingering ill will over World War II, have sunk to new lows since Tokyo last year nationalized a group of uninhabited islands claimed by China.
In Beijing's calculus, not all nations are equal offenders, however. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the Dalai Lama in her official office in 2007, Germany is a key economic partner and Beijing issued barely a peep. Beijing also tends to overlook the Dalai Lama's meetings with U.S. officials in deference to its crucial relationship with Washington.
The lack of a common policy in the West toward China's trip-line issues allows Beijing broad freedom to react, and European states especially are quick to capitalize when a neighbor falls afoul. Norway's loss in salmon exports, for example, has been a boon to other exporters, especially Scotland and the Faroe Islands.
While Beijing punishing Norway offers little risk, some question what China ultimately gains. Chinese leaders appear to have locked themselves into a game of political chicken from which they don't dare back down, said Marc Lanteigne, a China scholar at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.
Beijing may find other interests outweigh punishing Norway, particularly its desire for economic cooperation in navigating newly ice-free shipping routes in the Arctic and accessing Norwegian expertise in deep-water oil drilling, Lanteigne said.
"I would say that China's handling of the Nobel Prize affair has accomplished little for Beijing and I think the Chinese government is seeking the best way of breaking the ice, so to speak," Lanteigne said.
