Norway running short of options as it tries to improve ties with China
Norway has paid a high price since dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, with Beijing continuing to turn the screw
China's relationship with Oslo has remained frosty for far longer than expected since a Norwegian committee awarded dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, and experts say there is little the Scandinavian country can do to appease Beijing.
The latest blow to Sino-Norwegian trade came on September 10, when China announced a ban on salmon infected with ILA, a virus that is harmless to humans but prevalent in European waters.
While spokesmen at the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) - the Chinese body that regulates food safety - claim that the new legislation was in response to its discovery of a batch of contaminated Norwegian salmon this summer, experts suspect the gesture was a punitive one.
"The heavy-handed approach and the degree to which Norway has been singled out compared to other countries with equal ILA-related problems seems to carry political overtones" said Bjornar Sverdrup-Thygeson, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
Norwegian salmon has been the "fulcrum" of Chinese punitive measures since 2010, according to Sverdrup-Thygeson, who believes the latest move may have been motivated by the leak of a document from secret bilateral negotiations between China and the former Norwegian administration.
