Joining the 'empty chair' protest

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Beijing: In a defiant nod to jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, Chinese Twitter users on Friday posted photos of empty chairs - the way the Nobel committee plans to highlight the winner's absence.

In a sign of how sensitive the issue is, the Chinese characters for 'empty chair' were blocked on Renren, China's Facebook equivalent, and attempts to write them yielded a message saying the comments included 'prohibited content'.

The photos on Twitter depict a variety of empty chairs - some trendy, some functional, some old-fashioned - meant to illustrate Liu's inability to attend the ceremony on Friday in Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

One Twitter user described the shots as 'small acts of thinking of Liu Xiaobo in celebration of China's first-ever Nobel'.

The micro-blogging site is blocked in China but many of the country's more than 420 million web users - the world's largest online population - manage to bypass this using proxy servers.

Liu's wife, who is under house arrest, and other family members have also been blocked from going to the ceremony, and China - furious about the prize - has orchestrated a huge clampdown on dissidents, the Internet and the media.

Scores of activists and lawyers have been banned from leaving China, some have gone missing while others are under strict restrictions. Censors have also apparently begun blocking reports on foreign television networks about Liu.

On the Internet, key websites also appeared to be affected.

On Renren, apart from the characters for 'empty chair', those for 'empty stool' and 'Oslo' could not be posted on the site either.

On the Netease micro-blog, a Chinese Twitter equivalent, attempts to post the characters for 'empty chair' and 'empty stool' yielded a message asking the user to wait while the website was being "audited."

However, on another micro-blog on popular web portal sina.com, the words went through.

China has set up a huge online censorship system that aggressively blocks sites or snuffs out Internet content on topics considered sensitive.