Empty chair for China’s Nobel Prize winner Xiaobo

The lead author of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for democratic reform in China, Xiaobo is the first laureate to be under detention since Nazi Germany banned pacifist Carl von Ossietzky from attending in 1935.

China today said the award is a “political farce” that does not represent the majority of the world.

A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said: “We resolutely oppose any country or any person using the Nobel Prize to interfere with China’s internal affairs or infringe upon China’s legal sovereignty.”

Chinese authorities have prevented Xiaobo’s family and friends from attending the ceremony in Oslo, and stepped up security at key locations in Beijing.

The Nobel Committee represented the laureate with an empty chair during the ceremony, in what it said was a symbol of Chinese policy to isolate and repress dissidents.

About 60 Chinese gathered in the snowy square outside Oslo City Hall as the Nobel Peace Prize was presented to the empty chair where the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo should have sat, writes our International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum.

They were not fans of the Laureate.

"He is against his own people, he is against China, he is against Chinese people," said Yu Bai, a researcher. She and her friends see the prize as a western imposition, more proof that the west doesn't understand China and resents its rise.

There are a lot of ironies rumbing around here. Liu is locked up because he said and wrote things which the Chinese government cannot stomach. Chinese people are less repressed now than they used to be, but there is no freedom of speech and Liu's case proves it. So here were a group of Chinese in Norway freely expressing a view opposed to the Norwegian Committee and presumably its government.

I'm not sure they saw that irony, because they were focussing on another.

Read the World News Blog - Free speech...for Chinese protesters in Norway.

Professor Ai Xiaoming co signed Charter ’08 with Liu Xiaobo.

She told Channel 4 News: “I think the Prize is very important for Chinese people and for the rights defenders, for all the people who want China to be a democratic and free country, with freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association…so that we can all enjoy the freedom written in our Constitution.

“The Nobel Prize represents a value. People share this value not the value of power to harass and to arrest.

“The Prize means that the outside world is standing with the Chinese people who are fighting for their rights.”

Norwegian Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said: “We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3bn people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders.”

“If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favourable impact on the world. If not, there is a danger of social and economic crises arising in the country, with negative consequences for all”.

At the ceremony in Oslo, Channel 4 News’ international editor Lindsey Hilsum spoke to Chinese demonstrators who were angry at the award. Xiaobo is a traitor, they said, who is trying to impose western culture and politics on China.

One of the demonstrators – most of whom are students and researchers residing in Oslo – accused the Nobel Committee of awading the prize only to people who support the United States. They denied to Channel 4 News that the Chinese embassy had pressured them into demonstrating at the ceremony, maintaining they were there because the award to Xiaobo was “an insult to China”.

State newspapers claimed that by the award to Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for subversion last December, was a marked attempt to force foreign values on China.

“Today in Norway’s Oslo, there will be a farce staged: ‘The Trial of China’,” the Communist Party’s Global Times said in a leader.

China itself has urged other countries to boycott the ceremony honouring Xiaobo, who was closely involved in the 1989 Tiananmen protests that challenged the Communist Party’s power.

Xiaobo deserves his place in history

Growing up in China, Bessie Du was taught to share the joy of all Chinese winners in history - but how does this fit with China's rejection of Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo?

Read more: Xiaobo deserves his place in history

From his prison cell, Xiaobo dedicated the prize to those who died when troops crushed the protest, the former literature professor’s wife told Reuters.

She is under house arrest, her road blocked off with construction signs and surrounded by plain clothes policemen. Police have sectioned off parts of the street and assigned an area for journalists, where they are carrying out rigorous press card checks, as well as videoing journalists at work. Police earlier turned away a group of German diplomats who attempted to visit her.

The Nobel Committee has defended human rights as basic “universal values”, while China considers the phrase to be code for Western liberal values.

China’s burgeoning economic clout has seen several nations bend to a boycott of the ceremony, which the Nobel Committee insists will still be attended by two-thirds of those invited.

The Nobel Prize ceremony was sent live via Twitter to those Chinese who managed to break the Great Fire Wall of China, which censors internet content.

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives and Chris Smith, senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, plan to attend after the House’s 402-1 passage of a bill calling on China to release Xiaobo.

“Sadly, the Chinese government shares with the governments of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union the terrible distinction of being the only governments of major nations to block a Nobel Peace Prize recipient from accepting the prize,” Smith said in a statement.

He added that he was “outraged that nearly 20 nations have been strong-armed by China to boycott the ceremony”.