Had China looked closely at the calibre of people who win the Nobel Peace Prize, perhaps it would have reacted differently when imprisoned dissident and political activist Liu Xiaobo scooped the award.

Mr Liu immediately dedicated the Nobel Prize to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

“The Nobel Peace Prize committee was always naming strange people from China. If you are Chinese, all you need to do is to do something strange against China and then you are very likely to be nominated,” Vice Foreign Affairs Minister Fu Ying said before asking why someone “who said China should be divided into seven parts” won the award.

The Communist government’s bone of contention is that by awarding the prize to Mr Xiaobo the Nobel Committee was indirectly discrediting the Chinese judicial system, which has found the political activist guilty of “incitement to subversion of state power.”

But this is not the first time that a “rebel” is being awarded the coveted prize. For the past 11 decades, the highly coveted Nobel Peace Prize has gone to men and women who sacrificed their personal safety, dignity, careers and lives at the altar of public service.

So unpopular were the beliefs and ideologies of some of the past winners that four were assassinated. Both the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin were killed for their efforts to bring about a lasting peace between Israeli and Arabs.

Other presidents who have won the Nobel were deviants in their own right since they supported policies that drastically whittled down their popularity among the electorate.

Several years after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev brought an end to decades of Cold War, South Africa’s Frederik de Klerk followed, bringing down the curtain on apartheid by releasing Nelson Mandela.

Long before she joined the Nobel Peace Prize club in 2006, Prof Wangari Maathai was famous for her activism against the destruction of the environment.

Many are the times Prof Maathai and members of her Green Belt Movement were clobbered by police for holding demonstrations against the grabbing of public land.

Prof Maathai finds a comrade in Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition doyen who was crowned with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

Suu Kyi was honoured for her tireless efforts to bring justice and democracy to the tiny Southeast Asian country that has since been renamed Union of Myanmar.

Placed under house arrest by the Burmese military junta for many years, Suu Kyi is referred to by admirers as the “Nelson Mandela of Asia.”

But the efforts of these two powerful women are dwarfed by the humbling achievements of Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity based in Kolikata, India.

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in the Republic of Macedonia in 1910, Mother Teresa captured the imagination of the world by living among the impoverished people of this urban centre of the Indian state of West Bengal despite the millions of dollars that were flooding into her charity organisation. She won the Nobel Prize in 1979.

Carl von Ossietzky was among the few members of German civil society who dared raise a voice against Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party in the 1930s.For his troubles, he was sent to a Nazi concentration camp where he contracted a fatal bout of tuberculosis.
Ossietzky was declared the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 while bedridden with untreated TB. But just like China did to Liu Xiaobo, the Nazi government denied him the opportunity to collect the award in Oslo, warning him that doing so meant being stripped of his German citizenship.

Although he never picked up the award personally, he was blazing defiance even from the anguish of his deathbed.

“After much consideration, I have made the decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize which has fallen to me. I cannot share the view put forward to me by the representatives of the Secret State Police that in doing so I exclude myself from German society,” he declared.

“The Nobel Peace Prize is not a sign of an internal political struggle, but of understanding between peoples.”

Albert Luthuli and Desmond Tutu, the first and second Africans to receive the coveted prize, were honoured for their relentless yet peaceful campaign against apartheid rule in South Africa.

Being the ANC president, Luthuli differed with the militant section of the party who were advocating an armed struggle.

In 1967, seven years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the charismatic leader was hit by a speeding train in his home in Kwazulu-Natal and died. However Luthuli’s supporters saw the hand of the apartheid government in his death.

Other notable dissidents who have graced the red carpet in Oslo to collect Alfred Nobel’s award are the Dalai Lama, Yasser Arafat, Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to win the award, and Mohammed ElBaradei of Egypt.