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Moviegoers looking for a summer escape might think the highly anticipated blockbuster “Barbie” it would be a safe haven from the dizzying complexities of international politics.
Not so: The film has been banned in Vietnam for a scene featuring a map showing the South China Sea, a strategically important body of water that is hotly contested by China and several of its neighbors, many of which have straits. ties to the United States. state
Warner Bros. defended its image on Friday, saying the map is nothing more than a “child’s crayon drawing” and certainly not any kind of political statement.
So what is really going on here?
Why did Vietnam ban the movie?
Barbie was scheduled to hit Vietnamese theaters on the same day as its US general release, on July 21.
But on Monday, the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced it would revoke the film’s license, according to state media. Vietnamese newspapers reported that digital posters for the film had been pulled from the websites of local distributors.
“We did not grant a license for the American film ‘Barbie’ to be released in Vietnam because it contains the offensive image of the nine-dash line,” Vi Kien Thanh, head of the ministry’s film department, told the state agency. Tuoi Tre Newspaper.
What is the ‘nine dash line’?
This is China’s vast and fiercely contested territorial claim to most of the South China Sea. It consists of nine dashes of thick brush, representing a colossal maritime claim that has been summarily rejected by international law.
The South China Sea, twice the size of the Gulf of Mexico, is a trade lane replete with abundant estimated oil and gas reserves. And in recent years it has become an increasingly prominent arena for escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing.
China says it has “exercised jurisdiction over islands, reefs and relevant waters in the South China Sea for thousands of years.” as expressed by his Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2020. The problem is that so do its neighbors: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan and Vietnam.
China’s nine-dash line was rejected in a Hague court in 2016, and most Western experts say it has no basis in international law.
“It doesn’t make any sense from a historical or legal standpoint, but now it’s turned into this kind of emotional claim,” said Bill Hayton, author of “The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia.”
“Chinese nationalists, and Vietnamese nationalists, are very passionate about it and it has become a marker of national belonging,” he told NBC News.
What did ‘Barbie’ do to offend Vietnam?
It looks like the map is included in the trailer for the movie, though if that’s the case, there are plenty of unanswered questions.
Margot Robbie, who plays “Barbie”, is seen standing in front of a crude cartoon map. There is a line formed by what appears to be eight (instead of nine) dashes near China, but no other neighbors are shown.
The map is little more than a scribble, making proper analysis difficult. But within it is another similar dotted line connecting what appears to be North America with the Danish territory of Greenland, suggesting that these lines could represent more than just a maritime border.
However, Vietnam felt that the map showed that “Barbie” was on the side of China. The study has denied such intention.
“The map in Barbie Land is a whimsical and childish crayon drawing,” Warner Bros. said in a statement Friday. “The doodles represent Barbie’s fictional journey from Barbie Land to the real world. He did not intend to make any kind of statement.”
Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on the map. The Vietnamese Ministry of Culture also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Warner Bros.’s explanation.
Has this happened before?
This week, the same issue led to problems for South Korean pop sensation Blackpink.
Vietnam’s culture ministry said it was investigating the K-pop group’s China-based tour promoter, iMe Entertainment, which the ministry said had used the nine-dash line on its website. Some Vietnamese fans online demanded a boycott, according to Reuters.
The images appear to have been removed. But Tung Ngo, a journalist for Channel News Asia in Vietnam, tweeted that the maps did not, in fact, show the nine-dotted line, but the locations of the cities visited by the tour, which described a similar shape.
The promoter has apologized, Vietnam news website VnExpress reported. But it’s far from the first time this has happened.
Last year, Vietnam banned Sony’s action movie “Uncharted” because it actually showed a map with a nine-dash line. And Malaysia and the Philippines joined Vietnam in banning the 2019 DreamWorks animated film “Abominable” for the same reason. (DreamWorks Animation is owned by Universal Pictures, a division of NBCUniversal.)
China has a rich history of banning movies and TV shows that show maps or images of which its strict state censors frown.
“Top Gun: Maverick” was never released in mainland China after patches on the arms of star Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket featured the flags of Japan and Taiwan.
This was a rare case, however, as Hollywood frequently pandered to Beijing’s sensibilities to gain access to its gigantic market. Last year, “Fast & Furious” actor John Cena apologized in Mandarin for calling Taiwan a country during the film’s publicity tour.
Why is this such an emotional topic?
China says it wants a safe and cordial resolution to the South China Sea dispute, describing the situation there as stable. However, he has been optimistic in backing up his claims.
It has expanded various reefs by reclaiming land and building bases for apparent military use.. It has been accused of harassing fishing boats in Vietnam and elsewhere, as well as “buzzing” US planes and ships, which travel these seas to show that, in the eyes of most of the world, they are waters international.
China says it is protecting its sovereignty and maritime interests and that it is US planes and warships, as well as those of Washington’s allies, that threaten its national security and undermine regional peace and stability.
“The conflict over the South China Sea is inevitable because of its strategic importance,” said Sid Jin Yongming, a professor of international law at Ocean University of China. “The abundant biological and non-biological resources of the region make it a place that many countries fight for.”
The South China Sea also has an emotional pull for China and Vietnam because “it is linked to feelings of national humiliation for both countries,” said Hayton, the author, who is an associate member of Chatham House, a think tank in London.
For China, the sea represents territory it perceives as stolen by Japan, France, the UK and others during China’s so-called century of humiliation between the mid-19th and 20th centuries, Hayton said.
In reality, according to his research, the nine-dash line is “the result of translation errors and poor mapping” by pre-communist China that was later inherited by the ruling party today, he said.
“The Chinese government in the 1930s had no idea where these islands were,” he said, “so they copied colonial maps, made various mistakes along the way, and then drew a line around the South China Sea without really understanding what it meant. meant. .”
