Peng Liyuan: Tiananmen Square Photo Censored

A photo of China's new first lady Peng Liyuan singing to troops following the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square is causing a stir on the internet.

The image shows Ms Peng wearing a green military uniform, her windswept hair tied back in a ponytail as she sings to helmeted and rifle-bearing troops seated in rows.

The photo was taken after the military crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of people on June 3 and 4, 1989.

Many Chinese are still unaware that the massacre happened.

The photo has circulated mainly on Twitter, which is blocked in China - but there have been some postings on popular domestic microblogs.

The latter were swiftly scrubbed from China's internet before they could generate too much discussion online.

President Zuma shares a toast with Ms Peng in South Africa

The picture contrasts with Ms Peng's appearances this week in trendy suits and coiffed hair while touring Russia and Africa with her husband President Xi Jinping, waving to her enthusiastic hosts.

It revives a memory the leadership prefers to suppress and shows one of the challenges in presenting the first lady on the world stage as the softer side of China.

The country has no recent precedent for the role and faces a tricky balance at home.

The leadership wants Ms Peng to show the human side of Mr Xi, while not exposing too many perks of the elite.

And it must balance support for the couple with a wariness of personality cults that could skew the consensus rule among the Chinese Communist Party's leaders.

Ms Peng with President Xi, President Zuma and his wife

"I think that we have a lot of people hoping that because Xi Jinping walks around without a tie on and his wife is a singer who travels with him on trips that maybe we're dealing with a new kind of leader, but I think these images remind people that this is the same party," said Kelley Currie, a China human rights expert for the pro-democracy Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

"It's using some new tools and new techniques, for the same purposes: to preserve its own power."

Ms Peng, 50, a major general in the People's Liberation Army, is best known for soaring renditions of patriotic odes to the military and the party.

She has kept a low profile in recent years as her husband prepared to take over as Communist Party chief.

Her re-emergence has been accompanied by a blitz in domestic, state-run media hailing her beauty and charm, in a bid to harness the couple's popularity abroad.

President Xi and the First Lady arrive in Moscow

However, the government is stepping into little-charted and possibly treacherous waters for China.

In 1963, the glamorous Wang Guangmei, wife of President Liu Shaoqi, wore a tight-fitting qipao dress to a state banquet in Indonesia.

When the political tides turned against Mr Liu four years later, radical Red Guards forced Ms Wang to don the same dress and paraded her through the streets as a shameful example of capitalist corruption.

Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, played a key role in the same radical campaign in which political opponents were mercilessly persecuted; after his death, she was put on trial and imprisoned, then moved to a hospital where she hanged herself.

The image is a snapshot of the back cover of a 1989 issue of a publicly available military magazine, the PLA Pictorial, according to Sun Li, a Chinese reporter.

Mr Sun said he had taken a photo of it on his cell phone several years ago when it was inadvertently posted on his microblog.

He said he quickly deleted it and had no idea how it resurfaced on the internet years later.

Microblog users can easily save images and recirculate them even after the original posts have been deleted.

The picture spread further after it was tweeted by the US-based China Digital Times, which tracks Chinese online media.

For Ms Peng, the Tiananmen photo was no one-off: She has been in the military since age 18 and has fronted TV music videos featuring dancing lines of men with combat fatigues and heavy weaponry.

In an indication of her appeal in China despite her past, a man whose 19-year-old son was killed in the Tiananmen crackdown said he bears no grudges against her.

"If I had known about this back then, I would have been very disgusted by it. But now, looking at it objectively, it's all in the past," said Wang Fandi, whose son Wang Nan died from a bullet wound to his head.

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