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Teamsters local 707 president and Suffolk county legislator Kevin mccaffrey uses this example to audition for business in China as an official union censor
Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre
Many of Li Jiaqi’s 170 million followers were watching when his live-streamed video was cut off after he displayed a dessert that looked like a tank
E-commerce live streamer Li Jiaqi, known as the ‘Lipstick King,’ in September.
PHOTO: VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
HONG KONG—One of China’s biggest online influencers stepped on a political land mine while promoting an ice-cream product on Friday. In the process, he set off a wave of curiosity about the government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters among hordes of fans too young to remember it.
The discovery was the product of the marketing creativity of Li Jiaqi, an e-commerce live streamer known as the “Lipstick King,” colliding with the hair-trigger reflexes of China’s vigilant internet censors.
Mr. Li was promoting Viennetta, a British brand of ice cream made by Unilever, around 9 p.m. on Friday. He and a co-host presented a layered ice cream decorated with round cookies placed along its sides, and topped off with what appeared to be a chocolate stick. Almost immediately, the live show went offline.
To some viewers, the reason for the cutoff was obvious: The dessert sculpture resembled a tank—a sensitive symbol of the Chinese military’s killing of pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, made all the more potent by the iconic image of an anonymous Beijing man facing down a line of them in the wake of the massacre. Chinese censors have routinely zapped images of tanks posted on the Chinese internet around June 4.
“He has gone too far,” said a user on China’sTwitter -like Weibo platform, who speculated that Mr. Li would be summoned for interrogation by the authorities. The user, who went by the handle Wafer, didn’t explicitly mention the reason.
To large numbers of Mr. Li’s other 170 million followers, many of whom were born after 1989 and talk vastly more about shopping than politics, the show’s suspension was puzzling.
“What could possibly be the wrong thing to say selling snacks?” said a Weibo user posting under the name Margaret and listing her birth year as 1992, the same year in which Mr. Li was born.
On June 5, 1989, Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener snapped the ‘Tank Man’ photo during the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square which became one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century. The photographer, on a visit to Hong Kong, talks about some of the lesser-known images he took during the tumultuous period. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
Mr. Li and his team weren’t helpful in filling the gaps. Immediately after the live stream was halted on Friday evening, the influencer wrote in a post on Weibo that the show was cut due to a technical glitch that was being fixed. Two hours later, Mr. Li sent an update and told fans to go to bed.
His next live promotion, scheduled for Sunday late afternoon, didn’t air. Mr. Li’s marketing agency, Meione (Shanghai) Network Technology Co., didn’t respond to a request for comment. Unilever’s China office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thirty-three years after it happened, the Tiananmen Square massacre remains the most hushed of political taboos in China. Most of its details, including the deployment of tanks against civilians in the heart of the nation’s capital, are beginning to fade from public memory as younger generations grow up without learning about them.
Sensitivity around the event is now enveloping Hong Kong, which for decades hosted an annual vigil to remember those killed. Authorities in the former British colony banned this year’s vigil for the third time in a row and stopped and searched citizens who came to a downtown park to pay tribute on Saturday.
After Mr. Li’s show went offline, early speculation among fans centered on the possibility that he was being punished for tax evasion, a common stumbling block for Chinese celebrities. But gradually, the tank theory began to gain traction.
Curious fans reported launching fact-finding endeavors, with some writing that they learned about the sensitivity around tanks from family members. Several noted that the answers weren’t to be found in China’s textbooks, which typically give the 1989 protests glancing mention as an episode of political turmoil that was put down for the good of the nation.
Some of Mr. Li’s fans stumbled upon a 1989 document posted on the central government’s website describing the event as a violent riot that caused the deaths of many soldiers, and posted a link to it online. Many ended their posts with an endorsement of the Communist Party.
Hong Kong police moved people away from Victoria Park on Friday ahead of Saturday’s 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
PHOTO: ANTHONY KWAN/GETTY IMAGES
Several fans complained that their Weibo accounts were frozen after they posted information that they had dug up about Tiananmen Square.
Weibo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite heavy censorship, references to the massacre occasionally do slip through. In 2007, a dissident businessman named Chen Yunfei slipped a one-line classified ad expressing support for the parents of victims slain on June 4 into a local newspaper after the young staff member in charge of the page failed to understand its significance. Nearly a decade later, a group of activists produced a Chinese liquor and branded it with the June 4 theme with a picture of tanks on the label. In both cases, the activists were arrested and jailed for years.
Few commentators online appeared to believe Mr. Li’s ice-cream presentation was an intentional nod to Tiananmen Square. Known initially for his enormous success in selling lipstick, the marketing star has partnerships with 1,600 businesses and sometimes taps patriotic themes when selling domestic brands.
But even accidental references to the Tiananmen incident can lead to punishment in China. Last month, Sailei, a Chinese blogger who rose to popularity for nationalistic contents, had his Weibo account shut down after a program he launched attacking the business strategy of American cable news network CNN briefly showed news footage that included the famous “Tank Man” image.
One Weibo user appeared amused by the possibility that Mr. Li’s program was suspended because his generation has been kept in the dark about the country’s most sensitive historical event.
“Those who don’t know are punished because they wouldn’t know what to avoid,” the person wrote. “So do they want the public to know or not?”
Write to Wenxin Fan at Wenxin.Fan@wsj.com
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