One of China’s top bloggers has gone silent after livestreaming footage of a cake apparently shaped like a tank just before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, prompting debate over the highly sensitive event among tens of millions of young fans.
Discussion of the massacre on June 4, 1989, when Beijing set troops and tanks on peaceful protesters, is all but forbidden in China.
Li Jiaqi (李佳崎), a household name in China whose shows regularly draw millions of viewers, had his broadcast abruptly cut on Friday, when he appeared to present an ice cream cake with chocolate decorations that looked like a tank, just hours before the anniversary.
Photo: Reuters
Nothing has been posted by the online star since that show, while some search results for his name were being censored.
Many younger viewers were left dumbfounded by Li’s disappearance, especially after he also failed to appear for a scheduled show on Sunday.
Beijing has gone to exhaustive lengths to erase the bloody Tiananmen Square Massacre from collective memory, omitting it from history textbooks and censoring online discussion.
Social media platform Sina Weibo on Monday contained raucous debate about why the show was interrupted, with hashtags reaching more than 100 million views.
Many users speculated whether Li had been permanently banned from livestreaming, or if he had known about the symbolic date.
The online star, who was born in 1992 and made his name for the quickfire sale of lipsticks, appeals widely to waves of young, mostly female fans.
Many said they had learned about the 1989 massacre for the first time after searching for the significance behind his online disappearance.
One Sina Weibo user reassured anxious fans asking what had happened that the star had “just touched upon a sensitive topic.”
The famous “tank man” photograph — showing a lone man standing in front of tanks sent to quash dissent in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 — is so heavily censored in China that many younger Chinese are not aware of its existence or significance.
“Lots of people don’t know the story behind this cake,” one user wrote.
Another said that the incident had prompted many young people to use virtual private networks to get around strict censorship rules to research the massacre.
Others speculated that Li himself was also probably too young to understand the cake’s significance.
“He doesn’t know, he was never taught it at school,” one user wrote. “Now it’s come to this.”
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
PAPAL RETORT: Pope Leo told reporters that he has ‘no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel’ US President Donald Trump has feuded with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran conflict — setting off an unholy row that could have serious political implications for the Republican leader back in the US. Trump has drawn barbs even from some allies over the attacks on the US-born pontiff, who has criticized the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, the intervention in Venezuela and the Iran war. The president risks alienating the religious right in November’s crucial US midterm elections. So far the unprecedented clash between the leader of the most powerful military on Earth and the head of the world’s 1.4 billion
A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse in Florida in the death of his 18-year-old stepsister on a Carnival Cruise ship, the US Department of Justice said on Monday. Timothy Hudson was initially charged in February and subsequently indicted on March 10, but the breadth of the case was not known until a seal was lifted on Friday last week, weeks after US District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami said that he would be prosecuted as an adult at the request of the government. Anna Kepner had been traveling on the Carnival Horizon ship in November last
RSS