Beijing has inadvertently transformed two thirds of the world’s surface into a vast aquatic protest zone, activists have said, after the ashes of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo were cast into the sea in what friends believe was a bid to submerge his political ideas. Supporters of the democracy campaigner, who died in custody last week, will hold a series of global memorials on Wednesday, the seventh day since his death and a highly symbolic day of mourning in Chinese tradition. Many of those protests will be held beside – or in – the sea, an allusion to Liu’s controversial ocean burial which supporters saw as a deliberate attempt to deny them a place of pilgrimage.
