In late June, China announced that Liu, suffering from terminal liver cancer, was granted a medical parole.  Beijing’s aim of denying the dissident’s supporters a focal point is thwarted by protests from the Chinese coast to the Atlantic 
 
 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. Liu was jailed in 2009, charged with “inciting subversion of state power” and sentenced to 11 years imprisonment for his role in “Charter 08”. He was subsequently released from Liaoning Jinzhou Prison to a hospital under guard. He died in the hospital on July 13, 2017. The photo circulated widely on Twitter, as people mourned his death, but China wants to make sure that its citizens won’t see it: 
 
 A July 16 report from Citizen Lab, based out of the University of Toronto, reveals that images of Liu were automatically filtered in private one-on-one chats on Wechat, China’s most widely used chat app with 768 million daily active users. WhatsApp has a relatively small user base in China, and differentiates itself from major Chinese messaging services by offering end-to-end encryption. Language Group Chat One-to-one chat Simplified Chinese 24 16 Traditional Chinese 5 5 English 1 1 Table 4: Number of keyword combinations found blocked after Liu Xiaobo’s death 
 
 The content of the keyword combinations blocked after Liu Xiaobo’s death are much broader in scope. WeChat censors messages containing “刘晓波” and “Liu Xiaobo” in group chat 
 
 WeChat Image Censorship 
 
 Our previous research shows that image censorship occurs in both WeChat’s chat function and WeChat Moments. We used the filter predicate “pic twitter com #LiuXiaobo”, where “pic twitter com” was used to filter for tweets with embedded images (images hosted on the pic.twitter.com domain) and where “#LiuXiaobo” filtered for tweets with that hashtag. In other words, after being sent by one user, it disappeared and never reached the other user. Examples of blocked images include photos and cartoons of Liu Xiaobo and empty chairs symbolizing the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Liu, screenshots of censorship related to Liu on Sina Weibo, and news articles reporting Liu’s death. It was the first time it found image deletion occurring in chats between just two people on Wechat, Citizen Lab said. For example, media reports indicate that alternative ways to reference Liu include “Wang Xiaobo” and “Teacher Liu”. “We are doing this to keep his memory alive,” said Zhou Fengsuo, a California-based campaigner and Tiananmen survivor who donned a pair of tartan swimming trunks and took a dip in the Pacific to protest China’s “senseless” treatment of his friend.
– Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo's supporters say that in casting his ashes into the sea, the Chinese government hoped to deprive them of a permanent resting place to hold dear. What it did instead was create the world's biggest memorial, say those supporters, who plan to gather next to and even in the ocean Wednesday—the seventh day since Liu's death from multiple organ failure related to cancer at age 61—as part of a staging of memorials around the planet. The effort will follow water-minding acts and protests that have already occurred in New York, Boston, Melbourne, London, and Hong Kong. "The whole sea has become a place where we can be close to him," a friend tells the Guardian. Beijing's idea "backfired," adds another activist. "Now anyone can go to the sea and mourn." A report from the Canada-based Citizen Lab picked up by Quartz sees Beijing's hand in something else: It found that when users of Wechat—China's most popular messaging app—attempted to message an image of Liu to another user, the image was scrubbed and never made it to the intended recipient. (The dying Nobel Prize winner's last words were for his wife.)