Cirque du Soleil pulls Tiananmen image from China shows after 'collective gasp'

Cirque du Soleil has removed a photo of the Tiananmen crackdown from its show in China after surprising an audience of 15,000 in Beijing with the iconic "tank man" image, which remains banned and highly controversial in the country.

The Canadian art troupe is currently on its Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour, celebrating the musical legacy of the US pop artist who died in 2009.

During its first performance at the MasterCard Center in Beijing last Friday, three large screens showed the Associated Press photo of an unarmed man, who temporarily stopped tanks near Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. 

The photo appeared for four seconds during Jackson's track They Don’t Care About Us and "within a montage sequence of civil-rights style protest movements, resulting in an audible collective gasp from the audience", according to a blogpost on That's Beijing, which has since been deleted. 

The tour's publicist Laura Silverman said in an e-mailed statement that "the image was removed immediately and is no longer shown". "Our scheduled performances will go on as planned," she said.

On Thursday, the troupe is scheduled to perform its first of four performances in Shanghai, before heading to Hong Kong on Monday.