China’s censorship of top livestreamer introduces fans to Tiananmen Square massacre
But this year, those attempts backfired, drawing attention to and prompting questions about the massacre from previously oblivious young Chinese internet users.The fiasco started on Friday evening when a show 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 the British brand Wall’s.The layered ice cream, garnished with Oreo cookies on its 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 just hours before midnight June 4.On the eve of June 4, 1989, Chinese leaders sent in tanks and heavily armed troops to clear Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where student protesters had gathered for weeks to demand democracy and greater freedoms. Shortly after his livestream was cut, Li told his 50 million followers on Weibo that his team was fixing a “technical glitch” and asked them to “wait for a moment.” Two hours later, he apologized in another post that the live broadcast could no longer resume that evening due to “a failure of our internal equipment.””Everybody please go to bed early. We will bring you the products that have not been broadcast (tonight) in future livestreams,” he wrote.But the promised livestreams never came. On Sunday, Li failed to show up for another scheduled show, further confounding and worrying fans.On Monday, a search for Li’s name no longer returned relevant results on Taobao, the online shopping site where Li’s show was live streamed. He boasts 60 million followers on the site.CNN has reached out for 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 linking the suspension of Li’s broadcast to the tank-shaped ice cream started to proliferate. Some fans said they found out about the sensitivity of the tank symbol by circumventing China’s Great Firewall of online censorship, alluding to the massacre as “that event.” The discussions happened in veiled terms under the watchful eyes of censors, and many of them disappeared soon after they were posted. Among the posts that remained visible were those that vowed to “trust our (Communist) Party and trust our state” despite learning about the crackdown. Others said they believed Li was framed by “capitalists” or “foreign forces.”Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times, a US-based news website tracking censorship in China, said the Chinese government was caught in an awkward position — if it censors Li’s name entirely, it risks drawing even more attention to the case. Therefore, Weibo had to deploy a large amount of human power to manually censor every post that mentions 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 have it censored.”Censorship is all about keeping the truth from the public. But if people don’t know about it, they are bound 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 shut down after the company asked in a post on June 4: “Tell me loudly, what is the date today?”