China celebrated its "first" Nobel Prize winner after the author Mo Yan was awarded the 2012 medal for Literature.
His prize also gave the Chinese government a much-longed-for moment: a Nobel Prize it could boast about.
"It means China is getting stronger," said Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times newspaper.
"The award is the inevitable result of China's rising power and its development," said Zhang Yiwu, a professor at Peking university. "More honours will come to us, and even faster than we expected. They definitely made a far-sighted choice".
But instead, the only Chinese citizens honoured by the Nobel committee – the Dalai Lama and the dissident writer Liu Xiaobo – have been enemies of the state.
Mr Liu is currently the only Nobel Prize winner to be languishing in a jail cell. His wife, Liu Xia, is under house arrest. By contrast, Mr Mo is the only Nobel Prize winner to be a member of the Communist party.
There were instant catcalls of derision on the Chinese internet, with one wag pointing out that the problem with the Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo was that "one cannot get in [to China]" and the other "cannot get out [of prison]".
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