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Chinese security agents launched a wide-ranging clampdown on dissidents Friday, hours ahead of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.

Uniformed and plainclothes officers guarded the entrance to the compound in central Beijing where Liu's wife, Liu Xia, has lived under house arrest since the October announcement that her husband would receive the prize. Officers have guarded her home since her house arrest, but were out in greater force ahead of the award ceremony.

Guards checked the identities of all who entered, while about a dozen journalists stood just outside the gate. Police cars were positioned on every surrounding corner, and officers patrolled outside the apartment block where the blinds were drawn on Liu's two-story unit.

Liu Xia's phone and Internet connections have been cut off, and friends, family and colleagues in the country's embattled dissident community have been placed under house arrest or tight surveillance. Several in the community, including renowned artist Ai Weiwei and human rights lawyer Mo Shaoping, have been barred from leaving the country, apparently out of fear they might attend Friday's award ceremony in Oslo. Others have been removed from Beijing by security agents to keep them out of the loop entirely.

Liu's award has elicited a furious and wide-ranging response from Beijing, with daily tirades in state media and regular denouncements from Foreign Ministry officials. The vilification campaign has rocketed Liu from relative obscurity to worldwide fame, in apparent contradiction to the communist leadership's desire to negate his influence with an 11-year prison sentence for sedition. The term was handed down after he co-authored a bold appeal for human rights and multiparty democracy.

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Beijing said Friday's ceremony in the Norwegian capital, where the prize was presented in absentia to the imprisoned democracy activist, was "political theatre" and a product of a "Cold War mentality". They called the Norwegian Nobel Committee "clowns" and threatened that countries would face unspecified "consequences" if they did not stay away from the ceremony.

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Afghanistan, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Sudan, Tunisia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam.

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The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having "built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday because she knew nothing about the prize.

Lien was chosen from among eight nominees – some of whom are regularly mentioned for, or have already won, that other peace prize: including billionaire Bill Gates, former South African President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

While China regularly disparages the Dalai Lama, the religion's spiritual leader, the current Panchen Lama is a 20-year-old who was hand-picked by Beijing. The original boy named by the Dalai Lama has disappeared.

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The haste with which China's rival event was organized became clear at its chaotic award ceremony in the Chinese capital. Confucius Peace Prize jury chairman Tan Changliu, a writer on philosophy, insisted that his jury was a private group, without links to the Chinese government, and denied it was formed in response to the Nobel committee honoring Liu.

A brochure distributed at the ceremony says China "is a symbol of peace," and with its 1 billion-plus population should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace. In contrast, Norway is a small country of few people, which can only put forward minority choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, making "bias and even falsehoods" inevitable, said the announcement.

Lien Chan, now the honorary chairman of Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang Party, was chosen for his "contribution to the bridge of peace" between the mainland and Taiwan, read the award. Beijing considers the island a breakaway province.

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China's attempts to upstage the Nobel Peace Prize with a rival version ended in near-farce in Beijing on Thursday when the winner of the inaugural Confucius Peace Prize failed to show up to collect his prize.

But unlike Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who is unable to attend the Nobel ceremony because he is in a Chinese prison, the first Confucius laureate said did not attend because he had never heard of the prize.

The office of Lien Chan, a former vice-president of Taiwan who, according to the citation, won the Confucius award for his work in improving relations across the troubled Taiwan Strait, said it knew nothing of the 10,000 pound prize and had no plans to collect it.

The prize was billed as Beijing's riposte to this year's Nobel, which has infuriated Beijing.

Laureate or no, the Confucius jury, a collection of Chinese academics, pressed ahead with its ceremony at a packed Beijing conference facility, handing over a glass trophy and a bundle of bank-notes wrapped in a bow to a six year-old girl.

"For Peace!", shouted one of the jury members, while the girl, a "symbol of peace" stood looking rather frightened under the gaze of the world's media.

Taking questions from the floor, Professor Tan Changliu, of the Institute of Ideology in Beijing, the jury chairman, was met with a barrage of questions, almost all of which, to his obvious exasperation, concerned Liu Xiaobo, the man whom the Confucius prize had been designed to eclipse.

"Our Confucius Peace Prize has no connection with the three characters you mentioned," said the professor, refusing even to speak the name.

Asked if he was "supporting a supporter of Liu Xiaobo" by nominating President Carter, who has backed the Nobel peace laureate, the professor finally cracked.

"If you really want me to talk about Liu Xiaobo," he said, "then let's just say, we will see who is remembered by history, 500 years from now."

After more than an hour the ceremony was brought to a tempestuous close with a hot-tempered anti-American rant.

"Don't bully a weak country, as one day it will grow up," said Zhou Guidian, a philosophy professor at Beijing Normal University.

"At the moment everyone wants to make trouble for a rising China. China once was strong but it was defeated because it was contemptuous of others.

"Now a similar fate might befall you Westerners."

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