Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo with wife Liu Xia

The single empty seat in Oslo’s City Hall tomorrow will attract more attention than all the rest filled with the world’s great and good.

The vacant chair is for Liu Xiaobo. He should be in the Norwegian capital to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for “his unflinching and peaceful advocacy for reform”.

Instead, he will spend the day in the dank cell where he has been consigned to spend 11 years of his life.

The 54-year-old campaigner’s crime? “Inciting subversion of state power”. At least, that’s what he was found guilty of during a three-hour trial in which he was not allowed to defend himself.

In reality his “crime” was co-authoring Charter 08, a manifesto in which he called for the end of the one-party state, improved human rights and freedom of speech.

His imprisonment demonstrates the paradox at the heart of the People’s Republic of China – modern economic success alongside a humanitarian record rooted firmly in the Dark Ages.

This is Xiaobo’s third jail sentence. He could have fled China, but he chose to say and fight from within.

“He had chances to leave,” says his friend and fellow activist Dr Yang Jianli. “But he has a strong sense of mission.”

So, for the new Nobel Peace Laureate, tomorrow will be the same as the 715 days that preceded it.

At 6am, he will rise from his bunk in Jinzhou prison in the north-east of China and breakfast on plain rice before taking an hour’s exercise in the yard.

Then he will spend the morning studying English, before reading novels. Political works are banned.

Jinzhou prison has attracted controversy for torture of inmates, but Xiaobo seems to have been well-treated, especially following the international attention. “They are treating him better, give him better food,” his wife Liu Xia said following the only visit she has been permitted to make.

The activist rose to prominence during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Then at Columbia University in New York, he returned to join the demonstrations in which up to 4,000 peaceful protesters were killed. Following the massacre of June 4 Xiaobo was jailed for two years, but on his release he continued to campaign and was jailed again in 1996. This time he was sent to a re-education camp for three years. It was there he met and married Liu Xia.

Still refusing to be silenced, he was arrested again in December 2008 – two days before Charter 08’s publication. A year later he appeared in court on charges of subverting the state and two days later, on Christmas Day, he was sentenced to 11 years.

When Xiaobo was named the Nobel Prize winner on October 8, China called the decision an “obscenity” and banned news of the award. Even the term “11 years” has been blacked out from search-engine results. Xia was allowed to make the six-hour journey to visit him two days after the announcement. “We embraced and Xiaobo told me the prize was dedicated to all the lost souls of June 4, 1989. Then he broke down in tears,” she said.

Back home, she was placed under house arrest. Her telephone was cut off and her home surrounded by police. Her wish to collect the prize for her husband denied.

She wrote to 140 of her husband’s friends asking them to attend, but the authorities acted swiftly, placing most under house arrest or surveillance.

And the artist Ai Weiwei, who recently exhibited in London’s Tate Modern, was stopped from leaving the country in case he went to Oslo to represent Xiaobo.

So, for the first time in Prize history, no one will pick up the award – a symbolic moment that will further infuriate China as its actions are laid bare to the world.Demonstrations are planned around the world tomorrow, while leaders such as American President Barack Obama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have demanded his release.

But what of Xiaobo? Those closest to him say he will leave prison stronger – whether that release comes tomorrow or in 10 years.

“He’s a man of ideals,” says Dr Yang.

“So I think he takes his sentence OK. He will do more thinking, more reading and make himself ready to lead the movement when he gets out of prison.”