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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

The weakness is democracy. The Norwegian governing party - whoever it is - now knows that China's default position to perceived outside interference is disproportionate economic punishment, leading to pressure on the living standards of the voters they depend on. Autocratic states have discovered a critical weakness in the representative democracy and there's little we can currently do about it

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What if Norway was another autocratic state? Economic punishment could have made them bent anyway. Maybe your point is that autocracies bend less than democracies and you could be right: dictators usually don't care about economic sanctions because what they care about is to stay in charge. A poor or wealthy country doesn't matter much. Actually sanctions help them to build a narrative of world against the country and strengthen their grip.

I'm not aware of what happened in Norway after those Chinese sanctions. They could democratically decided that it was ethically worth losing those businesses. Any Norwegian people here?

Norwegian here!

I'd like to take the opportunity to say that the feeling at the time was that we got left out in the storm by ourselves by other western countries once the Chinese sanctions came on. In the direct aftermath everyone else just kinda looked the other way, and in the long run there is no way a tiny country like us can withstand that pressure over time.

Do you and your countrymen ever doubt whether the potential political toxicity of the prize is worth it for Norway to maintain sole administration? Has there ever been talk of transferring it to something like a multi-country consortium under the U.N.?

I like this plan, but I'd imagine in Alfred Nobel's will there is something requiring that the peace prize be awarded only in Norway.

I imagine what it should have been like. For once, I didn't even remember the issue. Sorry for that.

I found this analysis comparing the sanctions to Norway and Mongolia and the final result.

https://cpianalysis.org/2017/02/22/the-costs-of-normalisatio...

Democracies can choose not to trade with dictatorship.

True. However, the parties currently in government when that decision is made would prefer not to be voted out of power due to economic pressures.

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