Originally published at: Barbie's strange promotion of China's expansive territorial claims | Boing Boing
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The map is shown in the linked article on Politico.
I’m not seeing it, especially since there’s another dashed line on the map, but I can see that it could easily be interpreted that way.
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Wouldn’t surprise me. With China being such a huge market, Hollywood execs with dollar signs in their eyes have no doubt often kowotowed to Chinese governmental interests and demands.
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Yeah, I don’t find it hard to believe that they made it just recognisable enough to impress the chinese authorities, while being also obscure enough to not be noticed by other audiences - and if it is then having enough ambiguity to provide plausable deniability (there are only eight dashes, it’s an S shape not a U, there are other dashed lines on the map)
[Holy run-on sentence, Batman!]
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I’ve heard speculation (from David Spade on his podcast with Dana Carvey, for example) that maybe the reason there are no dumb teen comedies these days is because everybody has to be more careful about what they make fun of. There may be an element of that, I suppose (and if so, good!), but I also wonder if a larger reason is that more movies have to do well internationally, and dumb “my parents are away for the weekend so I’m going to have a small party with my nerd friends that turns into a rager when the cool kids turn up and mayhem ensues” teen comedies just don’t travel well.
The same way white privilege includes never having to even know about any number of issues that others have to worry about every single day, it’s sort of shocking to learn that there are delicate geopolitical tightropes that need to be walked by the producers of even the bubbliest of summer popcorn flicks.
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CBC has been reporting on this a fair bit and it’s a weird situation. Initially it seems like a lot of brouhaha over a silly coincidence, but the more you read about it, the harder it gets to dismiss it entirely. I suspect @RadioSilence ’s interpretation may be close to the truth.
China agreeing to show your movie could double or triple revenue, so the incentive to dog-whistle in their direction is real. I still think it’s plausible this is an accidental coincidence but also the line has no reason to be there in the Barbie map.
I could believe the production artist who drew it grabbed some random map off the internet and was blindly copying notable details from it so the crayon version would feel “mappy”. The infamous nine-dash Chinese line jumps out in many of these maps, and may have caught the artist’s eye without them realizing what it was.
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I wonder if it is as much that without nine dotted lines somewhere on the map near China, the film might have been banned there. Less kowtowing to demands, than anticipating them and getting one’s kowtowing in first!
(ETA Like @RadioSilence already noted in other words.)
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The fact that the vaguely depicted land mass is labled “Asia” and not “China”, and that the dotted lines don’t really follow the actual nine-dash-line contour, makes me think that the movie is taking the piss out the absurdity of the claim, not promoting it.
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BBC News have had several stories on this and also the Philippines since 3rd July:
As well as one about Blackpink:
Not sure about the intentionality aspect - but anyone showing maps of that area should by now be hyperaware of what the likely response will be. And they should absolutely not pander to the Chinese and their illegal claims.
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As a Canadian, I’m deeply offended by the map’s 10-dash Greenland line. They’re trying to steal our icebergs!
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Indeed. Media has been banned in China for accidentally portraying Taiwan as a little too independent, so I would think most big studio producers would be aware of the major things China will complain about.
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uh, and also, that dangly bit at the bottom is shaped exactly like Taiwan, which on this map is not an island for some reason, and is clearly attached to “the mainland”.
You’re kidding, right? It looks much closer to West Malaysia, a real peninsula in southeast Asia, and if these were meant to be Taiwan and the nine-dash line then they were placed in reverse.
For anyone who feels confident reading details off of this map, I’d like to know exactly what the red dots in Asia and yellow continent north of England are.
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Dog whistle?
I can only see eight dashes
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Alas, where she is standing in the still means we cannot see if Florida is properly in place, or if the movie is promoting Bugs Bunny’s territorial relocation.
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surely you mean this
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