There’s a new angle in the summer face-off between Oppenheimer and Barbie. It’s over which of the two movies is more politically controversial. The odd thing is, Barbie might win.
What might tilt the competition is a single shot in the film, lasting just a few seconds. It occurs when Barbie looks at a map of the real world. Barely visible on the map—but flashing like neon strobe lights to some viewers—is a dotted line in the middle of a sea. The government of Vietnam took that to be the infamous “nine-dash line” that the People’s Republic of China draws on its official maps to denote the maritime border in the South China Sea—a border that Vietnam, most other Asian countries, and the United States fiercely contest. As a result, Vietnam’s government banned the movie.
Sen. Ted Cruz careened into the squabble, denouncing the movie as “Chinese Communist propaganda.” Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, didn’t go quite that far but claimed that the map “illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under the please [Chinese Communist Party] censors.”
As the characters in a Coen brothers movie might say: What’s the rumpus?
For well over a decade, Hollywood studios have taken great care not to offend China in any way whatsoever, lest their products be banned from the lucrative Chinese market. Some of the resulting instances of self-censorship have hovered between appalling and hilarious.
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In 2012 MGM remade Red Dawn, a 1984 movie about a Soviet invasion of the United States. By the time of the reboot, U.S.–Russia relations had settled into the post–Cold War reset, so the enemy was recast as China. But studio execs, worried about losing the China market, ordered the script to be rewritten to paint the invaders as swarms of North Koreans—a completely preposterous premise. (The movie still grossed $65 million.)
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Fear of losing revenue is why Disney added a panda bear to the Chinese version of Zootopia; why Disney and Marvel together changed the ethnicity of the spiritual leader in Doctor Strange from Tibetan to Caucasian; why—as Emily Nussbaum reported in the New Yorker a few years ago—CBS censored a scene from The Good Fight that satirized Hollywood’s pandering to Beijing; why you almost never see any harsh reference to China in any American film or TV show.
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The flap over the Barbie map is almost a self-parody of cultural politics. The film’s studio, Warner Bros., issued a statement, insisting, “The map in Barbie Land is a whimsical, child-like crayon drawing. … It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
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In one sense, the studio is clearly correct. The map is an imaginary hodgepodge. The countries and seas look nothing like real countries or seas. The vague maritime border line has just eight dashes, not nine. This may be why the Philippine government, which at first followed Vietnam’s suit in banning the film, retracted the ban upon closer scrutiny.
Still, Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California who has written extensively about China and pop culture, told me in a phone conversation, “It’s strange that the map has any dashed lines at all.” He speculated that Warner Bros.—which has huge investments in China—is “trying to have it both ways: kowtowing to China by drawing the dashed lines but keeping plausible deniability by drawing them in an imaginary map.”
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There are a few signs, however, that at least some in Hollywood are growing less fearful of Beijing’s cultural dictates. Ever since 2017, when then-President Donald Trump launched his trade war, the China market has diminished in importance. In the spring of that year, Screen Daily reported that China’s once-bottomless well of resources for foreign entertainment had “slowed to a trickle.” Wang Jianlin, head of the Dalian Wanda Group, a major Chinese media firm who once nourished dreams of conquering Hollywood, had “his wings clipped” after Chairman Xi Jinping ordered corporations to reduce their debt. Huahua Media and the Shanghai Film Group backed out of a $1 billion financial deal that they had signed with Paramount just a few months earlier.
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Since then, each side has learned that the other might not be as vital as it once was. COVID shut down movie theaters in both countries. Once they reopened, Beijing’s cultural ministers discovered that Chinese-made movies did very well at the box office. Meanwhile, some Hollywood blockbusters did spectacularly well without earnings from China at all. In the most notorious case, Paramount digitally altered a scene in Top Gun: Maverick showing a patch of Taiwan’s flag on Tom Cruise’s flight jacket. When fans protested, the company restored the image. As a result, Beijing banned the film. But it has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide anyway.
Rosen told me that, even for big-budget movie franchises that haven’t been banned, ticket sales in China have been “much less strong” for more recent films than they were for earlier ones.
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Looking at those numbers (a cultural aspect of the broad “de-risking” in U.S.–China trade relations), some studio executives are beginning to ignore or defy Beijing’s cultural dictates.
In 2019 The Laundromat, a Netflix film made by Steven Soderbergh about the international financial scandals revealed in the Panama Papers, featured a whole segment about scandals involving Chinese state-owned companies.
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This year, in the first few episodes of The Blacklist’s 10th and final season, the bad guy was a Chinese criminal who, according to the plotline, worked with officials in the consulate of the People’s Republic of China in New York. As a fan of the show, I was startled by this—as was Rosen. The character had been featured in the show’s first season. But, Rosen said, “bringing the Chinese consulate into the plot goes a step beyond what had been done before.”
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It was particularly surprising because NBC’s parent company, Universal Pictures, which aired the show, has a huge theme park in Beijing and has co-produced about 50 films with China’s Perfect World Pictures.
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Nonetheless, John Eisendrath, a writer and executive producer of The Blacklist, told me in a phone conversation that the studio raised no complaints about these or any other episodes. “I think China has become less and less important as a market, and as a result, there might be less inclination to follow their rules,” he said.
And so we may see more of this indifference to Chinese sensitivities—because of not just loosening financial ties with Beijing but tightening political pressures at home. In April, Rep. Gallagher, whose House committee stands as a bipartisan funnel of Beijing bashing, met with some Hollywood leaders, including Disney’s Bob Iger, and, according to one knowledgeable source, “gave them an earful” on their China groveling.
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Will the next reboot of Red Dawn portray air and naval battles in the Taiwan Strait? Will the new James Bond go after a rogue villain on one of the militarized islands in the South China Sea? Will Keanu Reeves (whose John Wick 4 was banned in China because he attended a concert to aid Tibet) be allowed to make a movie about the Dalai Lama or Uyghur internment camps?
Probably not. China isn’t as big a market for the studios as it used to be, but it’s still very big. It will be interesting to see what the map’s eight-dash line in Barbie looks like—and whether the studio thinks any changes might be warranted—when the movie comes out in Blu-ray.