Editor’s Note for Wednesday, September 21, 2022
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
Online influencer Lǐ Jiāqí 李佳琦, called the “Lipstick King” for his ability to sell cosmetics over video livestreams, reappeared on Alibaba’s ecommerce platform Taobao for the first time since June 3. During a livestream session on that day, Li showed his audience a plate of tank-shaped ice cream, which was thought by some people to be a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
We’ll probably never know what happened. Maybe he was taken offline as part of the ongoing crackdown on “sissy men” and it had nothing to do with the tank. But given the timing, it was probably the tank. If that’s the case, Li is likely the victim of China’s highly effective censorship: Very few young Chinese people, if they have not studied abroad, immediately connect tanks to June 4. I’d be willing to bet that Li’s political mistake was made out of ignorance.
September 28 online event: Art as an Asset Class: A conversation with Ed Tang and John Auerbach.
Our word of the day is Lipstick King (口红一哥 kǒuhóng yīgē, which, translated literally, means “lipstick number one brother”).
—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief
