 The strategy is least subtle in official China-US co-productions, such as the 2018 monster-shark thriller The Meg and its sequel, Meg 2: The Trench , which opens in cinemas this weekend. At first blush, these look like standard summer fare: in The Meg's case, a deep-sea adventure that pits Jason Statham against giant CGI beasts. But then you start to notice the unusual choices: Chinese co-stars, largely unknown overseas, play unflaggingly patriotic and resourceful heroes; locations, such as the first Meg's Sanya Bay resort, in Hainan, look like awkward local stand-ins for more obviously cinematic surrounds. 'It becomes this uncomfortable mixture of flattery and ideology,' the producer explains. 'And, of course, all of the pro-China messaging you include for the benefit of the CCP's censors is then also seen and absorbed by every other audience around the world that watches it.' Exactly what the Central Propaganda Department will and won't permit in films isn't clear, since they have never published a definitive list. In fact, almost nothing gets written down at all: 'Working with them is 99 per cent guesswork,' another producer explains. Some broad rules are graspable, though: openly gay characters, naked bodies, drug use, graphic violence and occult or spiritual themes are all frowned upon, and denigration of China strictly forbidden. 'Some of these you can){kind=link}
China has tamed the American film industry, in ways you may not have noticed – but the mood among Washington policymakers is turning
Of all the things in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie that have made people mad, perhaps the most remarkable is a map. As Margot Robbie’s guileless heroine prepares to travel from Barbieland to the “real world”, she refers to a “world map” scrawled on a pull-down chart. After the Vietnamese government’s department of cinema saw the scene, they promptly blocked the film from release.
Why? Because, the censors argued, it showed that Barbie had taken China’s side in a long-running territorial dispute. Among the decorative scribbles was a dotted line hanging off “Asia” – which, they said, represented the “nine-dash line” that encircles a resource-rich area of the South China Sea claimed by the Chinese Communist Party as its own on their official charts.
That maritime boundary was rejected in 2016 by a UN tribunal, which sided with China’s South-east Asian neighbours. And Warner Bros insisted that Barbie’s map was a “child-like crayon drawing” of no political significance. So why on earth would Vietnam imagine a children’s toy would side with the authoritarian state? Perhaps because Hollywood has long made a habit of doing exactly that.
For example, in Sony’s 2022 blockbuster Uncharted, an animated sequence of a plane flying over Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam clearly showed the nine-dash line enclosing the contested waters. In the 2019 DreamWorks animation Abominable, the same line was depicted on a map pinned to a wall. As for Barbie’s culpability, the jury is still out, since her whole map is covered with similar doodles. Even so, the film remains banned in Vietnam while in the Philippines, the shot has been blurred.