The “Austin Li Paradox”
A new twist on the Streisand Effect, via the Chinese government
For years, Li Jiaqi — known in English as “Austin Li” — has been one of China’s hugest influencers. He runs a streaming show in which he shows off various products — lipstick, makeup, skincare products, as well as phones and toilet seats and instant noodles and more. Lipstick is his trademark, though; he’s sometimes known as the “iron lipstick bro”. He has over 150 million followers.
Then on June 3 of this year, he showed off an ice cream cake that was decorated, a bit weirdly, to look like a tank — with biscuits for wheels. “Almost immediately,” as Viola Zhou and Meaghan Tobin write for Rest of World, “the livestream cut out.”
Li completely vanished from online and public life. Nobody saw or heard from him for months.
What had happened? Chinese political thinkers — and folks on Weibo — figured that China’s online censors regarded the tank as a reference to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, in which the government violently and lethally cracked down on the protestors. The Chinese government has spent the ensuing decades carefully memory-holing…
