Here are two incidents from the past year. In one, Beijing’s city government announced that visitors from 45 countries could spend 72 hours in the city while in transit without having to apply for a visa.
The list includes all European states except Norway. Asked about the omission, Wang Qin, a senior Beijing official, said some countries were not eligible because their citizens or governments were of “low quality” and “badly behaved”.
What has Norway done wrong? It seems its crime is that it hosts the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded in 2010 to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident who is three years into an 11-year prison sentence. What did Mr Liu do? He helped draft and disseminate a manifesto calling for greater democracy.