Well, I guess yesterday was kind of a slow day for news — apparently there weren’t enough mass shootings to be worth more than just a mention in the news, so one of the stories was about the Barbie Movie. Yea, that’t right — the Barbie Movie.
Our daughter and our granddaughters were/are into Barbie dolls at least to some extent, but I never figured that would lead to a real movie. Maybe someone figures that enough girls have played with Barbie dolls over the years that they’d all pack the theaters…. but for whatever reason it seems that Barbie is shaping up to be one of the biggest movies this summer.
But — the fact that it is a movie about a doll wasn’t what got it a spot on the news. The movie was set to premier in Vietnam on July 21, but apparently Vietnamese officials saw a trailer or preview of the movie and banned the film.
According to the news story, The National Film Evaluation Council in Vietnam found a scene in the preview to be controversial. The scene shows a map of the world on the wall behind Barbie — what’s controversial about the map is that it appears to include the highly-disputed “nine-dash line.” According to the newscaster, the line is only eight dashes and extends from a poorly drawn map of Asia. But according to Vietnamese officials, it is a representation of the nine-dash-line.
The nine-dash-line first showed up on Chinese maps in the late 1940s and, it seems to represent China’s and Taiwan’s claims to the South China Sea. Since it first appeared, China has never explicitly stated what it means. One argument is that the line is a representation of China’s sovereign rights over fishing and natural resources of the area — which is within the parameters of the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS.) But — other Asian nations in the region are concerned that it is China’s attempt to claim total maritime control of the area.
China’s maritime claims cause concern because of the economic and geographical importance of the area marked by the nine-dash-line —it links the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Vietnam has long challenged China’s claim to the area inside the nine-dash-line. So has the Philippines, that had an international tribunal of arbitrators rule in its favor in 2016 and declare that China had no legal or historical rights to the area within the nine-dash line.
Vietnam’s Film Council announced that the Barbie movie would be banned in the country due the image of the nine-dash-line. The Philippines also threatened to ban the film for the same reason, but said they might change their stance if the controversial scene is edited out.
Over the years, many countries have made it clear that they believe the line is illegal, invalid, and potentially dangerous, and won’t tolerate Hollywood acknowledging or validating China’s claims in any manner.
So this line depicting China’s claim to own the South China Sea has been around for almost 80 years but it took Barbie to get it on the nightly news…..
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