Mattel's blonde doll has never made it big in China, a huge and complicated market for the toy that became a cultural icon for many girls and young women in the West.. Barbie was one of the many products that saw in the front line the profound change of the Asian power, which has gone from serving basically as a cheap manufacturing center, to also being a consumer colossus where foreign companies race not to lose their piece of the cake.
The American manufacturer of the doll has tried by all means, although without much success, to get the Chinese public to embrace its star toy. In 2009, the world's largest Barbie store opened in downtown Shanghai: a six-story building that included, in addition to clothes and more than 800 dolls for sale, attractions bathed in pink for the little ones, a spa for mothers and even a cocktail bar. The place closed just two years later.
But Mattel did not give up and, after the failure of its megastore, tried to turn the image of Barbie around and adapt it to the Chinese market.. Teamed up with famous local couturier Guo Pei to launch a limited-edition doll for Chinese New Year. He also introduced another in a red and gold dress, adorned with a dragon, with a face inspired by actress Anna May Wong, considered the first Chinese-American actress to come to Hollywood.
These winks helped give these dolls more visibility in the media and advertisements, but Barbie continued to go largely unnoticed in the Asian giant.. This is how it has been until now, when the toy has appeared in the flesh on the big screen played by Margot Robbie. Barbie the movie has become a worldwide phenomenon and in China it is making a lot of noise.
With an acceptable reception in the million-dollar box office of the second most populous country in the world, always dominated by cloying patriotic films, the film is receiving good reviews, with a score of 8.6 out of 10 on Douban, the reference website for movie reviews. films. Although where Barbie is succeeding the most is on Weibo, the Chinese brother of Twitter, being a trend with disparate debates on feminism and patriarchy as a result of the projection.
But if the film directed by Greta Gerwig is standing out in Asian lands for something, it is for publicity that surely no one expected: it was banned in Vietnam, accused of violating the country's territorial sovereignty. All because of a scene showing a map representing disputed Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, an important enclave of trade routes and rich oil and gas deposits, of which Beijing claims around 80% of the total waters. .
Margot Robbie in a scene from the Barbie movie trailer. The background shows the controversial map for which the film was banned in Vietnam.
Shown for just a fraction of a second, there is a specific detail of a cartoon map they captured from the Vietnam National Film Evaluation Council: a U-shaped dotted path that crosses into the ocean from what is supposed to be China and which they interpret as the nine-point line, the maritime boundary that Beijing demarcates over the disputed waters despite having been rejected by the International Court in The Hague in 2016. Even the military of the second world power have come to occupy – and militarize – some areas of the Spratly Islands archipelago, located between Vietnam and the Philippines, countries that have had several clashes with Chinese ships and maritime militias over territorial claims.
In the Philippines, it was also debated a couple of weeks ago whether to ban the screening of the film, as Vietnam did, although in the end the authorities only requested that the controversial map be “blurred” in a scene in which Barbie wants to travel to the “real world”.
Warner Bros, the studio in charge of the film, has always defended that it is a “purely accidental” image, that the map is a “childish” drawing with no intentional meaning or any political allusion to China.
Americans like Republican Ted Cruz, who accused the film of being “communist propaganda from China” do not see it that way.. Another Republican representative, Mike Gallagher, added that the “map depicting China's illegal land claims illustrates the pressure Hollywood is under to please the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censors.”
As of 2020, the Chinese film market surpasses the United States as the world's largest box office. This, according to critics, guarantees that Hollywood does everything possible for its films to access the Asian giant.. China's box office not only represents an opportunity for Hollywood, but can mean the difference between success and failure for a studio. Beijing knows this, and uses it to press more firmly, especially when it comes to eliminating certain scenes considered uncomfortable.
“Over the past two decades, China's growing box office market has given it incredible influence over Hollywood studios.. Much of this influence is exerted behind closed doors, where the Chinese censors accept or reject films for their mass-market screening,” explained writer and journalist Erich Schwartzel, author of Red Carpet, an exploration of China-Hollywood relations over the past two decades.
From the US, there are several analysts who have been warning for some time that it is its own film industry that is “self-censoring”, regularly shaping its productions to please Beijing, implementing its own limits on freedom of expression.