Chinese Influencer’s Ice-Cream Pitch Inadvertently Introduces Fans to Tiananmen Square Massacre

HONG KONG—One of China’s biggest online influencers stepped on a political land mine while promoting an ice-cream product on Friday. In the process, he set off a wave of curiosity about the government’s bloody 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters among hordes of fans too young to remember it.

The discovery was the product of the marketing creativity of Li Jiaqi, an e-commerce live streamer known as the “Lipstick King,” colliding with the hair-trigger reflexes of China’s vigilant internet censors.