Beijing was so enraged by the Nobel Prize awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo last year that it has exacted revenge against Norway through its salmon exports. Norway’s salmon exports for the first half of 2011 fell 61.8% from the same period of 2010.
The Nobel Prize awarded to Liu by the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee was celebrated as a victory for human rights. But for Norway’s fishing industry, which had always enjoyed the image of exporting the highest-quality salmon to China, the award has been costly.
Salmon that would normally be sold fresh at upscale restaurants in Shanghai and Beijing are now rotting in warehouses as China’s food safety inspectors insist they are merely enforcing stricter quarantine controls.
Despite the hit taken by Norways’s salmon industry, the nation’s overall trade with China has grown 46% for the first half of 2011, according to the Norwegian foreign office. This is seen as the result of China’s government deliberately targeting an industry strongly identified with Norway without producing an adverse impact on China’s consumers who have access to high quality salmon from Finland.
Norway’s foreign office is discussing the situation with the World Trade Organization with an eye toward filing a formal complaint against China.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu last year produced an immediate and harsh condemnation from Beijing which regards Liu as a man who had committed the crime of seeking to subvert the state and had imprisoned him. To this day China has refused to resume high-level political contacts with Norway while suspending all talks on a free-trade agreement.
