China’s state-run Global Times expressed disappointment with this year’s crop of “anti-China” Nobel Prize nominees in a Friday editorial, although it grudgingly allowed that the World Food Program (WFP) was a “safe choice” for Nobel Peace Prize winner because it would not offend anyone.

“While many applauded the result and acknowledged WFP’s contributions, it was still unexpected since the World Health Organization [W.H.O.] had been favored, as it is leading the global fight against COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus],” the Global Times wrote.

The United States withdrew support from the W.H.O. in July due to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) excessive influence over the organization, charging W.H.O. with uncritically relaying false information from China at crucial junctures early in the pandemic.

The Global Times sniffed that “more people, especially the Chinese, have seen through the true value of the Nobel Peace Prize” in recent years, coming to see the prize as a “political tool manipulated by Western powers.”

The CCP feels that way because it is the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, and Nobel Prize nominees tend to be concerned with such things as freedom of speech, oppression, and slavery. 

The Global Times sourly ran through a list of recent “anti-China” nominees, railing against a Norwegian parliamentarian for nominating the people of Hong Kong, a nomination for jailed Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti — who China has not allowed to speak with his family since he was imprisoned for “separatism” in 2014 — and the 2010 peace prize awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo, who the regime in Beijing relentlessly abused until he died for lack of medical treatment in 2017.

The Global Times topped this off by fuming over the peace prize awarded to the Dalai Lama in 1989, labeling the Tibetan spiritual leader a “separatist.” Then it concluded by whining that Nobel Prize nominees are “made to support Western media’s smearing of the Chinese government as a ‘totalitarian authority’ and portraying China as a society which has no freedom.”

On the same day the Global Times published this rant, CNN released a new report about China’s use of forced labor in Xinjiang province and the harvesting of human hair from imprisoned Uyghur Muslims.