Nigeria Content Online

The Chinese
government may have unwittingly given the world a new symbol of
opposition to oppression, an empty chair. But there’s another piece of
furniture that’s suddenly empty too and it delivers a different message.

The chair belonged
to Chinese author and activist Liu Xiabo, the laureate of the Nobel
Peace Prize for 2010, imprisoned for his writings and prevented from
travelling to Oslo to receive his award. It was placed instead on the
chair he would have occupied to mark his absence.

It’s quickly become
an iconic image and empty chairs have begun appearing in Chinese
Internet traffic. Cyberspace is closely policed in the People’s
Republic by thousands of censors. Within hours even the use of the
phrase ‘empty chair’ was being wiped from the web.

There is also an
empty table though, and that’s getting a little less attention. Norway
is a tiny nation of fewer than five million people that had been
negotiating Europe’s first free- trade agreement with China, an
exploding economy of more than a billion.

When the Norwegian
Nobel Committee honoured Mr Liu, Beijing suspended the negotiations.
The deal is at least temporarily off the table, potentially an enormous
blow to a range of Norwegian businesses and jobs.

Norwegian Foreign
Minister Jonas Gahr Store told me that his government has no influence
on the Nobel Committee and values the committee’s tradition of
independence. He said that Norway’s government wouldn’t sacrifice its
principles to please Beijing.

Norway is an
affluent country, with enormous oil and gas reserves that China and
many other nations are eager to buy. With or without the free-trade
agreement, its economy is in an enviable position.

But for governments without those assets and the assurance they
bring, the empty chair isn’t the only piece of furniture to remind them
of China’s reaction to this year’s Nobel Prize. There is also that
empty table.