Vietnam bans Barbie film over disputed map of China’s South China Sea claims

Vietnam has banned Warner Bros’s Barbie film from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that shows China’s unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea, state media have reported.

The U-shaped “nine-dash line” is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf, where it has awarded oil concessions.

Barbie is the latest movie to be banned in Vietnam for depicting China’s controversial nine-dash line, which was repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016. China refuses to recognise the ruling.

In 2019, the Vietnamese government pulled DreamWorks’s animated film Abominable and last year it banned Sony’s action movie Uncharted for the same reason. Netflix also removed the Australian spy drama Pine Gap in 2021.

A photograph taken in August 2022 shows a fishing boat near Vietnam’s Ly Son island, close to a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea region. Photograph: Nhac Nguyen/AFP/Getty Images

Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, was originally slated to open in Vietnam on 21 July, the same date as in the US, according to the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.

“We do not grant licence for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” the paper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, the head of the department of cinema, a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.

Warner Bros did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Vietnam and China have long had overlapping territorial claims to a potentially energy-rich stretch in the South China Sea. The south-east Asian country has repeatedly accused Chinese vessels of violating its sovereignty.