After presenting candy in the shape of a tank, streamer is suspended by China

For decades, the Chinese government has sought to erase all memories of its bloody military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests, especially around the anniversary on June 4th.

But this year those attempts backfired, drawing attention and raising questions about the massacre by young Chinese netizens previously unfamiliar with the topic.

The fiasco began on Friday night (3), when a program by Li Jiaqi, the country’s top e-commerce livestreamer, ended abruptly after he and his co-host presented the audience with a plate of Viennetta ice cream from British brand Wall’s. .

The layered ice cream, decorated with Oreo cookies on the sides and what appeared to be a chocolate ball and a chocolate stick on top, resembled the shape of a tank – an extremely sensitive icon to be displayed in public a few hours before midnight. night of the 4th of June.

On the eve of June 4, 1989, Chinese leaders sent heavily armed tanks and troops to clear Beijing’s Tiananmen Square (Tiananmen) where student protesters had gathered for weeks to demand democracy and more freedoms.

The crackdown, which killed hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters, is avoided in classrooms and strictly censored in the media and online. Censors are particularly vigilant in the run-up to the anniversary, quickly removing even the vaguest references — from candlestick emojis to coded phrases like “May 35th” — from the internet.

As a result, many young Chinese – especially those born after the massacre – grew up with little knowledge of the tragedy.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that many of Li’s younger fans were intrigued by the sudden suspension of his Friday show, during which he sold a wide variety of snacks and drinks, from cookies to sodas.

“What the hell happened to Li Jiaqi? Suddenly, your live stream disappeared. Can someone who knows about this tell us?” a user asked on Weibo, the Chinese platform similar to Twitter.

It is possible that Li himself, born in 1992, was also unaware of the symbolism. Having made a name for himself as the “King of Lipstick” after selling 15,000 lipsticks in just five minutes in 2018, Li was careful to remain in the good eyes of the authorities. As many of his colleagues have discovered, a careless political mistake risks losing commercial sponsorships or worse.

Shortly after his live stream was cut, Li told his 50 million Weibo followers that his team was fixing a “technical glitch” and asked them to “wait a moment.” Two hours later, he apologized in another post that the live stream could no longer resume that night due to “a failure of our internal equipment”.

“Everyone, please go to bed early. We will bring you the products that were not streamed (tonight) in future live streams,” he wrote.

But the promised live streams never came. On Sunday (5), Li did not appear for another scheduled program, further confusing and worrying fans.

On Monday, a search for Li’s name returned no more relevant results on Taobao, the online shopping site where Li’s show was live streamed. He has 60 million followers on the site.

THE CNN sought comments from Mei One, Li’s agency; Unilever, the British multinational that owns Wall’s; and Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant that owns Taobao.

On Weibo, posts and comments began to pop up linking the suspension of Li’s broadcast to the ice cream in the form of a tank. Some fans said they discovered the sensitivity of the tank symbol bypassing China’s Great Firewall of online censorship, alluding to the massacre as “that event”. The discussions took place in a veiled way under the watchful eye of the censors, and many of them disappeared shortly after being posted.

Among the posts that remained visible were those that promised to “trust our (communist) party and trust our state”, despite knowing about the repression. Others said they believed Li was framed by “capitalists” or “foreign forces”.

Eric Liu, an analyst at the China Digital Times, a US-based news site that monitors censorship in China, said the Chinese government was caught in an awkward position — if it censors Li’s name entirely, it risks calling even more attention to the case. Therefore, Weibo had to employ a great deal of human power to manually censor every post that mentioned Li’s name, Liu said.

“This is the Streisand effect,” he said, referring to the unintended consequence of drawing attention to information by trying to censor it.

“Censorship is keeping the truth from the public. But if people don’t know about it, they’re going to keep making ‘mistakes’ like this,” he said.

Similar incidents have happened before. Last year, Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social app similar to Instagram, had its Weibo account closed after the company asked in a post on June 4, “Tell me out loud, what is today’s date?”.