/ world today news/ It is not often that a comedy film causes an international political scandal involving several countries at the same time. And the fact that it is a comedy in the light genre makes the case exceptional. “Barbie” is, after all, not the provocative “Borat” (banned for broadcast in Kazakhstan) and not “The Death of Stalin” (banned for rent in Russia), but clearly a children’s story about pieces of pink plastic coming to life.
The scandal has affected everyone involved in the territorial dispute in the South China Sea. China is trying to turn this sea into its own inland lake with exclusive navigation, fishing and mining rights. Since the mid-20th century, his non-symbolic statements have had a symbol that looks like the Latin letter U made up of nine dashes.
The dashes placed on the map indicate the limits of Chinese claims to the water area. And each is set on an island or group of islands whose ownership can be disputed by up to five countries (or even six if you look at it through Taiwan’s eyes), as is the case with the Spratly archipelago. The most common name for this concept is the “nine-dash card.”
In the case of the disputed islands, we are most often talking about uninhabited stone pieces – control over them is necessary only for the calculation of border lines. But the region is important. The debate is heated. Everything has already happened – from military conflicts to full-fledged pogroms (for example, at Chinese stores in Vietnam).
For a Vietnamese, Filipino, Malay, Indonesian, Bruneian, the letter U or the nine dotted lines on the map is a provocation, an outright insult.
In “Barbie”, the ill-fated lines along the Asian continent were visible on a map drawn on the board with children’s crayons. The film was subsequently banned in Vietnam, and Philippine authorities slapped a “non-child” rating on the plastic doll comedy and demanded that the hyphen be “blurred out”, as is usually done with genital images.
In China, the film, on the contrary, began to defend itself. China’s foreign ministry advised “not to associate the South China Sea issue with ordinary daily cultural and interpersonal exchanges.” In this, the studio “Warner Bros” agrees with the Chinese, where they deny any political subtext in the Barbie card.
Like it or not, Russia must stay out of territorial conflicts along the letter U. China is our friend and ally, but its old enemy Vietnam is also our friend and ally: to decide in favor of one is to offend the other. It’s good that they don’t require us to choose, which we take advantage of. China maintains a similar neutrality on the question of ownership of the Kuril Islands. This is how we live.
But there is reason to believe that the scandal surrounding the pink card in the world of Barbie is not just a coincidence. There are three such cases where a seemingly innocuous film has been banned in Southeast Asia because of U and hyphens, three in four years. Enough to draw some conclusions, especially if our task is to analyze the film market in the interest of film studios.
In this, no one competes with modern China, except the producing country – the United States, therefore the Chinese market is the second most important after the domestic, American one. But access to it is strictly limited by the PRC authorities and there is a serious struggle for it.
As offensive as it is to the Vietnamese and Filipinos, the distribution of a Hollywood film in China is one of the priorities. And the question here is not only in the number of the population (in India, for example, there are more people), but also in the share of the middle class – those who can afford to go to the cinema regularly, preferably – with the whole family.
Things have not yet reached a kompromat war. For now, everything is limited to trying to somehow appease China’s leaders – preferably in such a way that they do not find out about it at home: this could lead to suspicions of treason.
The reality is that the Chinese leadership indirectly censors Hollywood movies, but self-censorship works even harder. A villain of Chinese origin in an American blockbuster is more than an exception. There were significantly more Russian villains during the Cold War.
American authorities see this “bowing” to the Chinese Communist Party as a national threat. For many years, Congress has threatened to ban this by law, but has yet to articulate it because it’s unclear exactly what to ban: American studios’ desire to make money off Chinese viewers?
The Pentagon unexpectedly came up with the most effective tool: it will not cooperate with studios that cooperate with Chinese authorities as part of the production cycle. This is notable considering the fact that the department controls a number of cinematographic facilities and most importantly rents filming equipment.
But water will find a hole, and thought even more so. If the goodwill of the Chinese government and the attention of the Chinese public can be achieved with nine dashes drawn in chalk on a cartoon map, it is definitely worth it. After all, Barbie has other credits to the People’s Republic of China: somewhere out there, she’s cast in pink plastic. The capitalist puppet has provided the socialist country with orders for years and billions, so it has the right to count on the loyalty of the CCP.
The Chinese first give money and only then make claims, and Hollywood, for its part, expands the space for compromises every year. If previously specially edited and censored versions of films were offered in China, now they make them directly in a version that would not be scary to show to President Xi Jinping.
So far, everything is like this – shy, as a joke, in crayons. And then they talk about what the font of the nine dashes is.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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