‘Barbie’ movie banne in Vietnam. Read here why
Vietnam has banned Warner Bros’s Barbie film from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that shows China’s unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea, reported Bloomberg Monday citing reports in VnExpress. The movie contains an ‘illegal image’ of disputed ‘nine-dash line’ used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, which Vietnam considers its continental shelf, the report says citing Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s cinema department.
The report says the movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling was expected to air in Vietnamese cinemas from July 21. Barbie is the latest movie to be banned in Vietnam for depicting China’s controversial nine-dash line, which was repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016.
China refuses to recognise the ruling. In 2022, Hanoi had banned Sony’s action movie Uncharted and in 2019, an animated film Abominable by DreamWorks was pulled down for the same reason. China claims more than 80% of the South China Sea and backs up its claim with a 1947 map that shows vague dashes — the nine-dash line —- looping down to a point about 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) south of its Hainan island, the report said Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan claim overlapping territorial claims to a potentially energy-rich maritime stretch in the South China Sea.
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