China overnight slammed the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo as a violation of the award's ideals, while the laureate's joyful wife led calls for his immediate release.

Beijing - which has repeatedly branded the 54-year-old writer a criminal following his December 2009 jailing for 11 years on subversion charges - also warned Norway that ties would suffer over the Nobel committee's decision.

"The Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded to those who work to promote ethnic harmony, international friendship, disarmament and who hold peace meetings. These were [Alfred] Nobel's wishes," foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said.

Ma added in a statement on the ministry's website: "Liu Xiaobo was found guilty of violating Chinese law and sentenced to prison by Chinese judicial organs. His actions run contrary to the purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize. By awarding the prize to this person, the Nobel committee has violated and blasphemed the award."

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/china-angered-by-nobel-peace-prize-for-jailed-dissident/story-e6frev00-1225936270202

Meanwhile at Military Central...:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates met his Chinese counterpart, Liang Guanglie, in Vietnam on Monday for the first time since the two militaries suspended talks with each other last winter, calling for the two countries to prevent “mistrust, miscalculations and mistakes.”

His message seemed directed mainly at officers like Lt. Cmdr. Tony Cao of the Chinese Navy.

Days before Mr. Gates arrived in Asia, Commander Cao was aboard a frigate in the Yellow Sea, conducting China’s first war games with the Australian Navy, exercises to which, he noted pointedly, the Americans were not invited.

Nor are they likely to be, he told Australian journalists in slightly bent English, until “the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface.”

The Pentagon is worried that its increasingly tense relationship with the Chinese military owes itself in part to the rising leaders of Commander Cao’s generation, who, much more than the country’s military elders, view the United States as the enemy. Older Chinese officers remember a time, before the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 set relations back, when American and Chinese forces made common cause against the Soviet Union.

The younger officers have known only an anti-American ideology, which casts the United States as bent on thwarting China’s rise.

“All militaries need a straw man, a perceived enemy, for solidarity,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of China’s military and leadership at the National University of Singapore. “And as a young officer or soldier, you always take the strongest of straw men to maximize the effect. Chinese military men, from the soldiers and platoon captains all the way up to the army commanders, were always taught that America would be their enemy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/asia/12beijing.html?pagewanted=print