China’s top e-commerce influencer Li Jiaqi disappeared for three months, but the ‘Lipstick King’ is back

Back in June, on the eve of this year’s anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, the country’s top live-streaming sales influencer Li Jiaqi (also known as Austin Li) disappeared from the internet. He hasn’t been seen on Alibaba Group’s Taobao Marketplace or in public since June 3, 2022.

Until Tuesday night, that is, when he returned to Taobao Marketplace for nearly two hours, garnering between 30 and 50 million visits to his channel.

So who is this popular influencer (nicknamed “Lipstick King” and “Lipstick Brother”), what was behind his curious disappearance back in June, and why is he suddenly back?

Li Jiaqi, China’s ‘Lipstick King’

Li is China’s top e-commerce influencer. He has more than 64 million followers and makes his money selling products — mostly beauty products — on Taobao Marketplace, a Chinese online shopping site that also happens to be the eighth most visited platform in the world.

He made a name for himself through his marathon streaming sessions where he would try on several hundred lipsticks over the course of several hours, selling millions of dollars of product in just one sitting. In 2021, Li’s 12-hour livestream on the platform generated US$1.7 billion in sales — he sold 15,000 lipsticks in the space of just five minutes, earning himself the nickname of China’s “Lipstick King”.

So where did he go wrong?

On June 3, 2022, the evening before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, Li was livestreaming on Taobao selling an ice cream cake — a Viennetta, to be precise. As was reported at the time, Li’s staff member presented the cake, which looked curiously like an armoured tank… and then the stream was switched off.

Li posted an apology to Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, claiming he was experiencing a “technical issue” before posting again saying the live event had been terminated. And that was the last time fans heard from Li — until last night.

So what happened? As the ABC reported in June, the tank-shaped Viennetta triggered the government’s censorship system, primed as it was for the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government doesn’t allow circulation of images of these demonstrations, where the Chinese military fired upon and killed pro-democracy protesters — as far as it is concerned, it never happened.

So it seems that Li was manually censored, and his livestream has been off the air for the past three months with no explanation given to his millions of fans. On Tuesday night he returned.

The King is back

As Reuters reported late on Tuesday night Australian time, Li was back streaming on the Taobao Marketplace for about two hours, with little warning of his return. He didn’t address his absence and his studio is yet to respond to questions about it or about whether he is here to stay.

He was marketing 26 products, most of which sold out quickly as his fans, alerted of his return, flooded to the channel. Such was the frenzy that Li even had to tell viewers not to buy products out of support, but only if you need them. Reuters puts the visit at 30 million; the South China Morning Post says he cracked 50 million visits on his return.

So why is he back, and why now? It’s unclear, although the South China Morning Post points out his return gave a serious boost to China’s e-commerce sector after months of Beijing cracking down on “irregularities” in the sector (Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post).

What we do know, however, is that Li isn’t the only influencer to have disappeared from screens in China — more of the country’s top livestreamers have gone dark since late last year in interesting circumstances.

E-commerce stars Viya (real name Huang Wei) and Zhu Chenhui (commonly known as Cherie) have both been missing from the internet since December 2021 after they were suddenly slapped with record fines totalling hundreds of millions of dollars for what was reported as tax evasion.

This article was first published by Crikey.