"No amount of huffing and puffing from Beijing will do away with the fact that holding a Nobel laureate in prison for the next decade is disastrous in terms of soft power, a necessary attribute for a genuine global power," said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

But the Chinese government has come up with a less magnanimous approach to the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to give the peace prize to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, 54, who is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion.