Popular social network QZone, made quite a ruckus as Chinese users of their site became enraged after stickers, or memes, that seem to poke fun at World War Two "comfort women" emerged on the platform.
The post featured images of elderly women who were kidnapped and forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese military. The recent news was aired on a TV documentary about comfort women, entitled "Twenty-two".
The captions, which were intended to be humorous, were words such as "Speechless and choked up" and "At a loss".
Up to 200,000 women from South East Asia were forced into sex slavery for the benefit of Japanese soldiers during World War Two, and many of them are Korean.
Around the 20th of August, QZone users noticed the stickers appearing in their feed and it was a week after 'Twenty-Two' was aired to coincide with the annual International Memorial Day for Comfort Women on 14 August.
Thousands took to the popular microblog Sina Weibo to vent their fury, with some calling for a boycott of Tencent mobile applications.
After the outburst of the enraged concerned netizens in Weibo, QZone issued a statement of apology on August 21 saying: "We are deeply sorry for the impact this incident has had," and said that it would carry out an investigation.
It claims that the images were "provided by a third-party".
"We have learnt a lesson and will resolutely ensure that such an incident does not happen again," it said.
However, many social media users appeared disgruntled with the explanation.
According to a post from 'QinYouDuZhong', "This third party has magically appeared," and the post garnered a like by over 1,500 users.
Some users even went as far as to suggest that this was Tencent's own government "propaganda" to plug the show.
State media have been heavily promoting 'Twenty-Two' over the past week, and have highlighted the endorsements it has received from Chinese celebrities.
According to Global Times, the film grossed 3.5m yuan ($524,000; £409,000) at the box office on the first day of its release.
The government's media often highlight the involvement of China's "comfort women" in World War Two around the 15th of August, which marks the anniversary of Japan's surrender in the conflict.
Up until now, there are 14 known "comfort women" that are still alive today in mainland China.
