After toppling Apple Music and fresh from an escalating Twitter tête-à-tête with Nicki Minaj over award-show nominations, popstar Taylor Swift looks set to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese government.

The singer and budding branding mogul has decided to try and sell her own Taylor Swift™ branded clothing in China, in an effort to get ahead of the legions of counterfeiters selling rips-off of her image and intellectual property. Swift has signed a deal with the Chinese online retailing giants JD.com and Alibaba, which will both start selling her t-shirts and women’s clothing from August 8^th.

The singer revealed the news to her 4m-strong army of Swifties in China with a video on Sina Weibo, the state-approved version of Twitter popular in the world’s largest economy.

Taylor Swift's Sina Weibo profile, displaying the contentious 1989 logo to her millions of followers

But an unexpected issue with the clothing has arisen due to the name of Swift’s current album and latest world tour, 1989.

While the singer was most likely alluding to her year of birth and not to the infamous events of June 4^th, 1989 – which saw the Chinese military send tanks into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to crush a nascent student-led revolution – the Chinese state has firmly controlled the dissemination of any information relating to the day’s events.

Swift’s album has in fact dual references to the anti-rebellion push, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of political dissidents; the album’s name references the year, while the singer’s name is abbreviated to TS, which could be interpreted a pro-Tiananmen Square stance by the Bad Blood singer.

As it currently stands, the Chinese state, which severely limits the exposure of its citizens to foreign pop culture that paints the Communist government in any negative light, has yet to take a definitive stance on its opinion of Taylor Swift. But the significance of the year and the unfortunate coincidence of the album branding may raise questions of a cultural war to come.