Vietnam banned the upcoming film Barbie from theaters on Monday because a scene in the film shows a map with China’s “Nine-Dash Line” in it, a fictitious border the regime in Beijing created that puts almost the entire South China Sea under Chinese control.
The Nine-Dash Line faced a challenge in international court in 2016 and was utterly defeated, but China simply ignored the court ruling and proceeded as though its territorial claims were legitimate. Vietnam, a fellow communist nation, has its own territorial claims in the South China Sea and has grown increasingly confrontational with China over them. In addition to Vietnam, the “nine-dash line” claims for China the sovereign territory of the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan.
“We do not grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the Nine-Dash Line,” Vietnam’s Department of Cinema chief Vi Kien Thanh said, as quoted by state media.
In this July 13, 2018, photo, a globe shows the islands on the South China Sea with nine-dash line claims under Chinese territory on display at a bookstore in Beijing (AP Photo/Andy Wong).
Vietnam has banned several other films for displaying the imaginary Chinese border, notably including an animated film about the Abominable Snowman called Abominable in 2019.
Abominable was a joint production between America’s DreamWorks Animation and China’s Pearl Studio. The protagonist was a Chinese girl who helps a lost yeti return to his home on Mount Everest. A brief scene in the movie showed the protagonist walking past a map of East Asia that has the Nine-Dash Line drawn upon it, with absurdly large dashes. As critics noted at the time, there was no reason for the map to be included or have the maritime border marked so ostentatiously on it.
Abominable was in Vietnamese theaters for ten days before complaints were lodged about the Nine-Dash Line map, and it was pulled from distribution. The movie’s Vietnamese distributor, CGV, was fined about $7,200, and several bureaucrats in the Department of Cinema were reprimanded for not spotting the map sooner.
Barbie, a movie about the famous line of dolls and accessories, is scheduled to premiere in both Vietnam and the United States on July 21. No details were offered by either the studio or Vietnamese officials about why a Chinese propaganda map would appear in a film about children’s toys, but Vietnamese state media claimed the map was displayed “multiple times” during the movie.
The out-of-fiction reasons would be that Barbie toymaker Mattel has extensive business interests in China, Hollywood would like to recover some of its lost Chinese ticket sales, and Mattel is planning to launch an entire line of movies around its toys, assuming Barbie does not crash and burn at the box office.
The Chinese Communist government can be as pushy about getting the Nine-Dash Line accepted by foreigners as the Vietnamese Communist government is about censoring it. In May 2018, China pressured American clothing retailer Gap into apologizing for selling a T-shirt that depicted China without the Nine-Dash Line and all of the land masses it encompasses.
Gap executives groveled after Chinese nationalists erupted in anger over photos of the T-shirt on the rack at a store in Canada. The company’s apology stated the shirt, which did not include features such as Taiwan and island chains in the South China Sea, “failed to reflect the correct map of China.”