CENSORED

Popular Chinese Livestreamer Vanishes From Public View After Tank Cakes Makes Tiananmen Square Reference

Li Jiaqi’s show abruptly ended after he showed viewers a cake resembling a tank on the eve of the anniversary of the massacre, and he’s been a no-show ever since.

A popular Chinese livestreamer has disappeared from public view after he was apparently censored last week for referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre during a broadcast. Li Jiaqi, an internet salesman dubbed the “Lipstick King” for once having sold 15,000 lipsticks during a livestream, showed off a cake shaped like a tank during a show last Friday—the eve of the anniversary of the massacre, when at least hundreds of pro-democracy protesters died at the hands of the Chinese military. The broadcast abruptly cut out, according to the BBC, and Li has since not returned to his livestream show, though he claimed on Weibo that he had simply had technical difficulties. Images of the tank-shape cake, which the BBC said had Oreos for wheels and a wafer pipe resembling a cannon, have apparently now been wiped from social media, and Li’s profile was removed from the e-commerce platform where he streamed his show. The scandal has sparked questions among Li’s Generation Z viewers, many of whom never learned about the 1989 massacre due to the Chinese government’s campaign to erase it from history. As Chinese censors have reportedly been scrubbing all references to the cake fiasco, some social media users are said to have only now learned about that grim part of Chinese history thanks to Li’s livestream. “Thanks to Li, I now get to know that history,” one Weibo user was quoted as saying.