China. Liu was the third person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky (1935) and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). As the laureate was absent, Liu's place on the podium was unoccupied; Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann read I Have No Enemies, an essay that Liu had written for his trial in December 2009, in place of the acceptance speech. Nomination and announcement The Nobel Committee disclosed there were a record number of nominations in 2010 – a total of 237, of which 38 were organisations. Although the committee has a policy of keeping nominations confidential for 50 years, some nominators made announcements. Among the nominees were Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, the International Space Station, the Internet and its three founders Larry Roberts, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. Also on the list were Chinese dissidents Liu Xiaobo, Hu Jia, Gao Zhisheng, Chen Guangcheng, Bao Tong, and Rebiya Kadeer. Liu was nominated by International PEN, the worldwide association of writers. Interested in Western philosophy, Liu made his reputation as a literary critic with a treatise on the state of modern Chinese literature: an article he published in 1986 that criticised Chinese writers for their dependence on the state, and their deficit in free-thinking, caused a stir in the Chinese literary world. His challenging ideas caught the attention of the intellectuals; he lectured all over China and abroad. He was in New York when the 1989 pro-democracy movement erupted in China; he returned immediately to China and spent most of his time amongst the protesters in Tiananmen Square. This, and his subsequent leadership role in the Charter 08 pro-democracy manifesto for China, led the Chinese authorities to censor his views as subversive. Liu was jailed for 11 years on 25 December 2009, for "inciting subversion of state power." A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said "It would be completely wrong for the Nobel Prize committee to award the prize to [Liu]". In January 2010, Václav Havel and others—including the 14th Dalai Lama, André Glucksmann, Vartan Gregorian, New Zealand politician Mike Moore, Karel Schwarzenberg, Desmond Tutu and Grigory Yavlinsky—published an article endorsing Liu. A professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Xu Youyu, and others, addressed an open letter "to the European People" in support of Liu, while 14 exiled dissidents urged the Nobel Committee to pass over Liu's nomination, arguing