BEIJING — As much of the world on Friday focused their eyes on the empty seat in Oslo that starkly represented the absence of the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, a lone Chinese blogger posted the image of a chair on the country’s most popular microblogging site.

Within minutes, it had been deleted by a censor’s unseen hand.

That small gesture of solidarity with Mr. Liu, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for “subversion of state power,” is largely emblematic of China’s sweeping effort to quash any expression of sympathy for a man whose plight has captivated the world.

All mentions of the pageantry at the award ceremony on Friday were scrubbed from the Chinese Internet, and the relatively small number of people who have access to overseas news outlets such as BBC and CNN saw their television screens go black in the days leading up the ceremony. On Friday night, the most discussed topics on Sina, the largest news portal, included plunging temperatures and flight delays at Beijing’s airport.

To those outside China, the government’s response to the Norwegian committee’s decision to give Mr. Liu the Nobel Peace Prize was remarkable for its bombast and audacity.

Beijing dispatched its diplomats to warn countries against sending envoys to the ceremony, while the Foreign Ministry and state media issued a steady drumbeat of invective, describing the prize as a Western plot to hold back a rising China and branding the award’s supporters as “clowns.” On Friday, Global Times, a populist tabloid affiliated with the party-owned People’s Daily, called the event a “political farce” and Oslo a “cult center.”

But while such outbursts may have provoked snickers around the world, the stern-faced men who run China’s government may have the last laugh. Minxin Pei, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California, said those who focus solely on the damage done to Beijing’s global image are missing the point. In the end, he said, the only opinions that matter are those held by China’s 1.3 billion citizens.

“After Tiananmen, China suffered three years of international isolation, but it recovered,” he said, referring to the violent crackdown of pro-democracy protesters in 1989. “The regime’s approach to the Nobel was strategic. They know the world will come calling again because China and its economy cannot be ignored for long.”

After the prize was announced, China’s censors promptly took measures to stymie the spread of the news via the Internet and text messaging, while police agents began detaining and harassing liberal colleagues and supporters.

But once they realized they could not control the debate beyond their nation’s borders from seeping into China, Mr. Pei and other analysts say, senior leaders decided to tailor their message to the domestic audience. Although the Chinese government has become increasingly adept at controlling information available to its 440 million Internet users, several people with knowledge of the government’s deliberations said the Nobel Prizepresented propaganda officials with a daunting challenge: how to smear what many ordinary Chinese see as honor, without fanning interest in Mr. Liu.

Within a few days of the announcement, China’s Politburo met to complete a game plan: Mr. Liu would be painted as a traitor and the Nobel committee’s decision would be officially labeled a “plot by Western enemy forces, headed by the United States,” according to a veteran journalist at a party-run media outlet who had knowledge of the deliberations.

Wielding rhetoric redolent of the Maoist era, a succession of commentaries soon appeared that played on nationalistic sentiment by highlighting Mr. Liu’s affiliation with an American pro-democracy group. Others pulled quotes from an interview he gave to a Hong Kong magazine in 1988 in which he described colonialism as the antidote to China’s problems. (Supporters say his remarks were incendiary to make a point about China’s dysfunction.)

In every article about him, Mr. Liu was described as a criminal who had been tried and convicted by the nation’s justice system.

At the same time, the censors assiduously removed information about Mr. Liu not approved by the propaganda ministry, including any mention at all of Charter 08, the pro-democracy manifesto that he helped shape and that led to his conviction.

The intense media controls appear to have had the desired effect. According to the veteran party journalist, an official survey of university students taken since the prize was awarded found that 85 percent said they knew nothing about Mr. Liu and Charter 08.

Although it is not clear exactly when the survey was taken, that figure was partly borne out Friday in conversations with more than three dozen people across the capital, many of them students at two of the country’s top universities. One student said she thought the Nobel recipient was the Dalai Lama (he won in 1989) and another insisted that the award ceremony had long since taken place. Most said they had no idea who Mr. Liu was, but a handful quietly voiced support for him and his ideas.

Even if they did not know his name, those who were aware that a Chinese citizen was the recipient said they agreed with the government that his selection was a plot to embarrass China.

Xiao Feng, 27, said she thought the recipient had probably done something to harm the nation. “I think this year’s prize is a little bit unfair,” she said. “From what I can tell, its purpose is to humiliate China.”