Barbie South China Sea Map: Why the Movie Was Banned In Vietnam
It’s one of the most anticipated, well-marketed cinematic releases in recent memory. But turns out not everyone is happy with the contents of the Greta Gerwig-directed blockbuster, and Barbie’s South China Sea map is actually getting the movie banned.
The 2023 film has been in the works since before December 2016 when comedian Amy Schumer was originally attached to star as Barbie. She later reportedly backed out due to creative differences, per The Hollywood Reporter. Then, in 2019, Robbie was confirmed to be taking on the lead role of Barbie. “It comes with a lot of baggage,” Robbie told Variety in July 2023 of playing the iconic doll. “And a lot of nostalgic connections. But with that comes a lot of exciting ways to attack it. People generally hear Barbie and think, ‘I know what that movie is going to be,’ and then they hear that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I don’t.’”
Gosling, meanwhile, got real about playing Ken at CinemaCon 2023 in April. “I have to be honest: I only knew Ken from afar before now. I didn’t know Ken from within. I doubted my Kenergy,” he said. “I didn’t see it, but Margot and Greta conjured this out of me somehow. One day I was bleaching my hair, shaving my legs and wearing bespoke pink outfits, and rollerblading down Venice Beach.” But what is it about Barbie’s South China Sea map that’s drawn so much controversy in a certain part of the world? Read on.
Barbie’s South China Sea map
It’s unclear which part of the film Barbie’s South China appears in, but Vietnam has banned the movie from being released because the film depicts China’s sweeping claim over almost the entire South China Sea. This is what’s known as the nine-dash-line, a set of line segments on various maps that indicate the territorial claims of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, mainland China) and the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) in the South China Sea.
In the scene, Barbie is seen standing in front of a crudely drawn cartoon map of the Real World, there is a line made up of what appears to be eight (rather than nine) dashes near China but no other neighboring countries are shown.
While China’s foreign ministry said in 2020 that it has “exercised jurisdiction over relevant islands, reefs and waters in the South China Sea for thousands of years,” the issue is that so have its neighbors: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan and Vietnam. A teeming trade route with oil and gas reserves, the region has also served as the stage for increasing hostilities between Beijing and Washington. The line has been featured on Chinese maps since the 1940s despite being rejected by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2016.
The reaction to the film’s depiction of this hotly contested body of water has led to Barbie’s banning in Vietnam, with the nation’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism revoking the movie’s license. “We do not grant a license for the American movie Barbie to be released in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” Vi Kien Thanh, head of the ministry’s department of cinema, told the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.
“To the Chinese, the nine-dash line signifies their legitimate claims to the South China Sea,” Peter Zinoman, a professor of history and Southeast Asian studies at UC Berkeley and author of The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940, told Vox. “To the Vietnamese, it symbolizes a brazen act of imperialist bullying that elevates Chinese national interest over an older shared set of interests of socialist brotherhood.”
While the Philippines has not banned the film as Vietnam has, the country’s Movie and Television Review Classification Board has asked the film distributor, Warner Bros., to blur the controversial dash lines on the fictitious world map. “The Review Committee is convinced that the contentious scene does not depict the ‘nine-dash line’. Instead, the map portrayed the route of the make-believe journey of Barbie from Barbie Land to the ‘real world’, as an integral part of the story,” they said in a statement. “Rest assured that the Board exhausted all possible resources in arriving at this decision as we have not hesitated in the past to sanction filmmakers/producers/distributors for exhibiting the fictitious ‘nine-dash line’ in their materials.”
In a statement released in response to Vietnam’s banning of the film, Warner Bros. said, “The map in Barbie Land is a whimsical, child-like crayon drawing. The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world. It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
The controversy hasn’t overshadowed the release of the film elsewhere, however, with many cinemas selling out well ahead of its release on July 21, 2023, with box office projections at a $80m to $100m opening weekend.
What has dominated online chat, however, is that Barbie is opening on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s wartime epic about the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer. This double-header has been dubbed “Barbenheimer” by the internet and this cinematic conundrum has people debating which film they’ll see first, including some of the world’s biggest stars themselves. “I mean, I’ll be going to see Barbie 100 percent — I can’t wait to see it,” Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy said in an interview with IGN. “I think it’s just great for the industry and for audiences that we have two amazing films by amazing filmmakers coming out on the same day.” He added, “Yeah, you can spend the whole day in the cinema—what’s better than that?”
Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise has also weighed in on the double-header, though he won’t see them both on the same day. “I want to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer. I’ll see them opening weekend. Friday I’ll see Oppenheimer first and then Barbie on Saturday,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Barbie has also been responsible for the explosion of Barbiecore—a movement that involves candy floss pink fashion, shoes, beauty, and household items. The return of Barbiecore rose in popularity in the fashion industry first. Fashion runways and red carpets have had an influx of hot pink. Last season, Valentino had an entirely hot pink runway show with 22 complete looks in the Barbie-approved shade. Since the vibrant fashion show, the looks have shown up at the Grammy Awards, Coachella and pretty much every event with a professional photographer.
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