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.”
OPTIMISTIC: A Philippine Air Force spokeswoman said the military believed the crew were safe and were hopeful that they and the jet would be recovered A Philippine Air Force FA-50 jet and its two-person crew are missing after flying in support of ground forces fighting communist rebels in the southern Mindanao region, a military official said yesterday. Philippine Air Force spokeswoman Colonel Consuelo Castillo said the jet was flying “over land” on the way to its target area when it went missing during a “tactical night operation in support of our ground troops.” While she declined to provide mission specifics, Philippine Army spokesman Colonel Louie Dema-ala confirmed that the missing FA-50 was part of a squadron sent “to provide air support” to troops fighting communist rebels in
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
ECONOMIC DISTORTION? The US commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Elon Musk’s arguments that spending by the government does not create value for the economy US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that government spending could be separated from GDP reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the US economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because
RSS