an eminent scholar, but was reportedly little-known inside the People's Republic of China (PRC) at the time of the award due to official censorship. Those who had heard about Liu had mixed views about him. Some clearly supported the government position, whereas one university student was quoted as saying "George Orwell probably had no idea that what he wrote would end up being the reality of China now." "Liu Xiaobo" and "Nobel Peace Prize" became the most searched terms among internet users in China. However, some time after the release of the official response from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, government censors screened the news item, and there were reports of searches in China using Chinese search engines returning error pages. Web searches using Chinese search engines for "Liu Xiaobo" in Chinese without attaching the words "Peace Prize," gave information about Liu. Yet most sites found "Liu" plus "Peace Prize" yield only the official foreign ministry response. CNN reported that any mention of "Nobel Prize" on microblogging sites was censored. One person claimed that his SIM card was deactivated after he sent a text message to a relative about the Nobel Peace Prize. Accustomed to circumventing Chinese internet censorship, bloggers and forum-users used variants of Liu's name and posted subtle or cryptic messages to express their elation about the award or sarcasm towards the state. The statement on 8 October by blogger Han Han consisted of only a pair of double quote marks. Less than three weeks after the announcement of the award to Liu, the Nobel Peace Prize website came under a cyber attack. There was an attempt to hack into the computer of the secretary of the Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad by a forged email on 3 November. A number of individuals received an email containing a trojan horse purportedly disguised as a pdf-file invitation to the award ceremony from the Oslo Freedom Forum. Investigators traced both the attack and the email to an intermediate server reportedly in a Taiwanese university. Experts say the address had been falsified, and the exact origin was unknown; it was emphasised that no link to any party in mainland China could be established. After activists posted photographs of a symbolic empty chair on Internet fora and noticeboards, censors responded by removing the images and making "empty chair" a banned search term. Hong Kong Many political groups—including the Democratic Party and the Hong Kong