Vietnam has banned the Barbie movie because of a scene depicting Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.
In Vietnam, the Barbie film was set to release on July 21, the same date as in the United States.
But Vietnamese authorities decided to ban the movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, because of a scene that depicts the nine-dash line.
China uses this U‑shaped geographical demarcation on maps to illustrate its historical claims over 90 percent of the resource-rich South China Sea. It is a source of tensions with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.
Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, confirmed the ban to the state-run Vietnamese newspaper Tuoi Tre.
Last year, the Vietnamese government pulled the action movie Unchartered for the same reason, as well as the animated movie Abominable in 2019. In 2021, Netflix removed Pine Gap, an Australian spy drama, from its platform because of the nine-dash line.
It is unclear which scene of the Barbie movie depicts the nine-dash line, also referred to in Vietnam as the “cow tongue” for its shape.
The distribution company Warner Bros didn’t comment on the ban.
In 2016, in a court action brought up by the Philippines, the International Court in The Hague found that Chinese claims had no legal basis. But China, which built artificial islands in the South China Sea and often conducts naval patrols there, doesn’t recognize the ruling.
Besides movies, Vietnam may also ban the import of goods showing the 2,000-kilometer (1,242-mile) U‑shaped line.
In 2019, the ministry of Industry and Trade told importers to inspect and reject any goods that contain the map after they found some Chinese-made cars sold in Vietnam had the nine-dash line in the default navigation system. A Volkswagen’s local distributor was also fined in 2020 because the model Touareg had the nine-dash line on its navigation app.
China may be the first trade partner of its Communist-ruled neighbor, but the two share a history of tense relations despite a normalization since the 1990s. A survey from the American think tank Pew Research Center conducted in 2017 found that 80 percent of Vietnamese viewed Chinese power and influence as a major threat and the top threat facing their nation.
