HONG KONG (AP) – Online entertainment, including China’s most popular live e-commerce and tank-decorated cake, has raised questions among some Chinese about quelling pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The order for the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army to shoot at unarmed civilians is a sensitive topic that has long been heavily censored by the ruling Communist Party.
Li Jiaqi, China’s most popular online e-commerce broadcaster, is known for selling everything from lipsticks to pans to its online show, where viewers can buy items directly at a discount.
He became popular in 2018, earning the nickname “King of Lipstick” after trying 380 lipsticks during a seven-hour stream and selling 15,000 lipsticks in just five minutes during an online shopping festival.
But last Friday, Lee’s online show, which drew tens of thousands of viewers, was interrupted after a woman appeared on camera holding what looked like a small white cake decorated with waffles and cookies to look like a military tank, according to published reports. screenshots on social media platforms.
The sudden end left thousands of his fans confused. Li briefly became a popular search word on Chinese social media.
The show was on June 3, on the eve of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on thousands of students gathered in a large square in the heart of Beijing to demand greater democracy. Hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters are believed to have died.
One of the most famous photographs of military repression, commonly called “Tank Man”, shows a man holding plastic bags standing in front of a row of tanks, as if blocking their approach to the main east-west artery of Beijing, Eternal Peace Avenue or Chang ‘an Avenue. All such photos are censored in China.
Shortly after its stream was shut down on Friday, Lee posted on his Weibo platform, similar to Twitter, saying the stream ended early due to a “technical error”. Recurrence of the stream was also not uploaded.
Neither Alibaba nor Li’s agency, MeiOne, responded to requests for comment.
His absence sparked a wave of speculation among Chinese online, many of whom were born after 1989, and since almost all mentions of repression were censored in China, I don’t know much about what happened then.
Keywords and phrases related to the incident have been censored. The search for “Tiananmen June 4” or “Tiananmen 1989” did not yield results in search engines and social media platforms in China.
“Who can tell me what happened to Li Jiachi?” Said a Weibo user. “I can’t seem to find any information.”
By Monday, Chinese censors had deleted all photos of the tank-shaped cake and all videos from the live broadcast on the Chinese Internet. Lee hasn’t appeared in another live session since.
Those familiar with the Tiananmen Square massacre asked, using mysterious allusions to June 4 to avoid censorship, whether Lee was aware of the sensitivity of showing a tank on a show like his own.
“Li Jiachi is guilty of not knowing about an incident he was not allowed to know about, and now he has to prove that he really didn’t know about an incident he didn’t know about,” said a Weibo user with a MaxWell manipulator. 2000, pointing out the nature of the situation in Catch-22.
The apparent effort to prevent people from watching the show has led some to say they are learning for the first time about Tiananmen’s repression.
“I didn’t know before, but now I think I do,” said a Weibo user, where self-censoring posts using obscure language to refer to sensitive topics are common to avoid censorship and prevent account suspension.
The apparent censorship of Lee’s show had the opposite effect, drawing more attention to it and to what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, said Sean Raine, founder and managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai.
“For many Chinese consumers, taking Li offline at this point could have the opposite effect of drawing attention to an incident that no one in China usually talks about,” Raine said.
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