Famous Tiananmen massacre monument removed 0:54
Hong Kong (CNN) --
For decades, the Chinese government has tried to erase all memories of its bloody military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests, especially around the June 4 anniversary.
But this year, those attempts have backfired, drawing attention and raising questions about the massacre from young Chinese internet users who had previously remained oblivious to it.
The debacle began on Friday night, when a show by Li Jiaqi, the country's leading e-commerce host, abruptly ended after he and his co-host presented the audience with a plate of British-brand Wall's Viennetta ice cream.
The layered ice cream, adorned with Oreo cookies on its sides and what appeared to be a chocolate ball and chocolate stick on top, resembled a tank, an extremely delicate symbol to be displayed in public just hours before midnight on June 4.
Facts you should know about the Tiananmen Square massacre
On the eve of June 4, 1989, Chinese leaders sent tanks and heavily armed troops to clear Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where student protesters had gathered for weeks to demand democracy and greater freedoms.
Chinese streamer Li Jiaqi and his co-host present a plate of ice cream that looks like a tank during his show on the eve of June 4.
The crackdown, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed protesters were killed, is rejected in the classroom and strictly censored in the media and on the Internet.
Censors are especially vigilant in the run-up to its anniversary, quickly erasing even the vaguest references from the internet, from candle emojis to scrambled phrases like "May 35."
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As a result, many young Chinese, especially those born after the Tiananmen massacre, have grown up knowing nothing of the tragedy.
So it's no wonder that many of Li's mostly young fans were taken aback by the sudden suspension of his Friday show, during which he sold a wide range of snacks and drinks, from cookies to soft drinks.
"What the hell happened to Li Jiaqi? His livestream suddenly disappeared. Can someone who knows tell us?" asked a user on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like platform.
Li himself, born in 1992, may not have been aware of the symbolism either.
Having risen to fame as the "king of lipstick" after selling 15,000 lipsticks in just five minutes in 2018, Li had gone to great lengths to court the authorities.
As many of his peers have discovered, a political blunder risks losing corporate sponsorships or worse.
A man holds up a poster of the famous "Tank Man" who stood up to Chinese military tanks in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
Shortly after his livestream was cut off, Li told his 50 million Weibo followers that his team was fixing a "technical glitch" and asked them to "wait a minute."
Two hours later, he apologized in another post saying the live stream could no longer resume that night due to "a failure of our internal team."
"Everyone please go to bed early. We'll be bringing you the products that haven't aired (tonight) in future livestreams," he wrote.
But the promised livestreams never came.
On Sunday, Li did not show up at another scheduled show, further confusing and worrying fans.
On Monday, a search for Li's name failed to return relevant results on Taobao, the online shopping site where Li's show was broadcast live.
Li has 60 million followers on the site.
CNN has contacted Mei One, Li's agency, Unilever, the British multinational that owns Wall's, and Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant that owns Taobao, for comment.
On Weibo, posts and comments linking the suspension of Li's broadcast to tank-shaped ice cream began to proliferate.
Some fans said they learned of the tank symbol's sensitivity by getting around China's Great Firewall of online censorship, referring to the massacre as "that event."
The discussions took place in veiled terms under the watchful eye of censors, and many of them disappeared shortly after being published.
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Among the messages that remained visible were those that promised to "trust our (Communist) Party and trust our State" despite knowing of the repression.
Others said they believed Li had been framed by "capitalists" or "foreign forces."
Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times, a US-based news website that tracks censorship in China, said the Chinese government was at a crossroads: if it censored Li's name entirely, he risked drawing even more attention to the case.
Therefore, Weibo had to expend a great deal of human energy 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 get it censored.
"Censorship is about hiding the truth from the public. But if people don't know, they will surely continue to make 'mistakes' like this," he said.
Similar incidents have already occurred.
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 out loud, what's the date today?"
censorship in ChinaTiananmen