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Certainly, the Chinese government sees the irony in blacking out media coverage of dissident Liu Xiaobo’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, which was earned protesting such police state repression. Even if self-aware, however, the vacuity of compunction in Beijing deafens, for China has only intensified its coercive censorship evidently emboldened by an act they esteem so utterly “obscene”.

It remains to be seen whether this fodder can be used to gain concessions in the economic and diplomatic Cold War with China, enabling the U.S. to abandon confusing and disparate approaches that have amounted to a policy of appeasement, as the contest warms beyond the global financial realm.

Xiaobo won the award for his courage to take a stand against the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, especially his December, 2008 organization of the “Charter 08” petition calling for sweeping political reforms, which won him an 11-year prison term for alleged "inciting subversion of state power".

Although a truism known the world over – at least, outside of China – that “the” global economic power is also a totalitarian state, quite disturbing is this reality’s latest elucidation because of the Chinese government’s disproportionate reactionary acerbity.

China may resist joining the 21st century in terms of human rights, but its prowess in the latest in state control technology is nothing less than impressive as its “Great Firewall” was able to blanket the news in near complete silence in a country with over 1.3 billion people. Liu Xiabobo himself languishes in prison probably still unawares he even won the prize. In addition, they shut down cell phones of those who dare celebrate Xiaobo’s achievement.