The soon-to-be-released Barbie film contains a scene that features what Vietnam regards as an ‘offensive image’ of China’s nine-dash line, a detail used in Chinese maps of the South China Sea to show its territorial claims.
For Vietnam, that is enough to ban the film about the famous doll – even before its scheduled 21 July release.
The BBC reports that Vietnam is among a number of countries that contest China’s claim to almost all of the South China Sea.
Film studio Warner Bros’s Barbie is not the only production to have been banned by Vietnam for featuring the nine-dash line.
In 2019, the DreamWorks animated film Abominable was pulled for the same reason. Three years later, Sony action movie Uncharted also fell foul of Vietnam’s Department of Cinema, a state body that vets foreign films.
Two years ago, Australian spy drama Pine Gap was removed from the Vietnamese market by Netflix, following a complaint from authorities.
According to the BBC, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all have competing claims in the South China Sea.
In 2016 an international tribunal in The Hague ruled against Chinese claims in the South China Sea, but Beijing did not recognise the judgment. China has been building military bases on artificial islands in the area for years and often conducts naval patrols there in a bid to assert its territorial claims.
[Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash_line#/media/File:9_dotted_line.png]