China's Nine-Dash Line And The Controversy Behind It Explained
By Richard Milner/July 4, 2023 11:00 am EST

Vietnam and China haven't exactly had the most harmonious historical relationship. Nowadays, as NPR says, mentioning "the war" to Vietnamese people will invoke memories not of invading U.S. troops, but invading Chinese troops. In 1979, 200,000 Chinese troops flooded into Vietnam to "punish" them for interfering with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Remember that this was a time of extreme political turmoil in the region. The Cambodian Khmer Rouge was a maniacal, horrific regime that murdered between 25 and 30% of its own population, as UNESCO says. They were also backed by China.

Vietnam, under communist rule, didn't subjugate Cambodia out of the goodness of its heart, but self-preservation, as the Khmer Times explains. And so China invaded them in retaliation and killed 50,000 people in the short-lived Sino-Vietnamese War. If this was a one-off incident it would be bad enough. But China and Vietnam have been in conflict for almost 2,000 years, as Britannica outlines. The consequences of their mutual animosity reverberate all the way to the present, even down to something as silly as where Hollywood movies get released.

Case in point: the upcoming "Barbie" movie — the least likely thing anyone would ever connect to an ancient Southeast Asian conflict. As The Conversation says, "Barbie" contains an image of the South China Sea that shows the controversial "nine-dash line," a dashed outline of supposedly China-owned waters intruding on Vietnam's space. Vietnam wasn't happy about the image and banned "Barbie's" release in the country.

While the nine-dash line might look like nothing more than a dashed line on paper in the South China Sea — because that's what it is — the Chinese government and military take it very, very seriously. They take it so seriously that Hollywood studios like Warner Brothers continue to directly portray the nine-dash line in films like "Barbie," "Uncharted," and "Abominable" to appease the Chinese market even at the cost of alienating countries like Vietnam, as listed on Decider.

Time reports that the nine-dash line is a loose, historically-used but legally-invalid claim on territory not actually belonging to China. Their claim was officially refuted in 2016 when an international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, declared that "China's claims to 90% of the world's critical trade route are bogus." But even though this ruling is "legally binding," there are no methods or bodies in place to enforce it. And so the drama over ownership of the South China Sea as outlined by the nine-dash line continues.

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/1330366/china-ni ... explained/

My question is, why would a Barbie movie need to have a map like this in it in the first place??? Would having something like that be required by the Chinese authorities in order to approve the film for release there?

My question is :
In which country are the barbie factories ?

Ong Tay wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 10:21 am My question is, why would a Barbie movie need to have a map like this in it in the first place??? Would having something like that be required by the Chinese authorities in order to approve the film for release there?

Don’t they have a role for a person that is supposed to check for sensitivities like this?

And i was always sure all the barbies in SE-asia where in 130 and 136 street, no ??

violet wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 1:32 pm

Ong Tay wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 10:21 am My question is, why would a Barbie movie need to have a map like this in it in the first place??? Would having something like that be required by the Chinese authorities in order to approve the film for release there?

Don’t they have a role for a person that is supposed to check for sensitivities like this?

Probably not. And at the end of the day, Vietnam's potential box office haul is trivial compared to what the studio could make in China.

But as a long-time resident of Vietnam familiar with most of the major sensitive international geopolitical issues here, perhaps I should consider pitching such skills to Hollywood...

That "line " is complete bullshit.

One point that is seldom raised or mentioned is that Taiwan (ROC) also claims the area within the 9-dash line

'The nine-dash line, at various times also referred to as the eleven-dash line (by the ROC), is a set of line segments on various maps that indicate the territorial claims of the People's Republic of China (PRC, "mainland China") and Taiwan (ROC, "Taiwan") in the South China Sea.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-dash ... hina%20Sea.

It kind of complicates things, for America especially.

World's apart ?