China's Miss World Payback?

When the Nobel Prize committee announced that the winner of this year's peace prize would be noted Chinese dissident – and current political prisoner - Liu Xiaobo, China warned that Sino-Norwegian relations would likely suffer as a result, but this is a bit ridiculous.

People in Norway are crying foul, saying that biased judging on the part of the Chinese caused Norwegian beauty Mariann Birkedal the Miss World crown, held last week on the Chinese island of Hainan. Birkedal is a former Miss Universe who also won the “Top Model” award in the preliminary rounds of the Miss World pageant; yet she failed to even make the top five finalists, a situation that has people in Norway claiming that Birkedal is the victim of some political payback on the part of the Chinese.

China viewed the Liu's Nobel Prize as meddling in their internal affairs on the part of the Norwegian government, even though the Nobel Prize winners are determined by an independent organization which happens to be based in Norway (perhaps it's just hard for the Chinese government to believe that there can be anything that operates in a given country that's not under the control of the State...). After protesting Lui's consideration for the Peace Prize, China then warned that relations between their country and Norway would suffer if he won the award.