How Barbie sparked the latest geopolitics tussle between China and Vietnam

Unforeseen political ripples occur when Barbie enters the South China sea dispute. The film's controversial map with the nine-dash line led to a ban in Vietnam

For a doll, Barbie has had her fair share of controversies for promoting regressive gender roles, a particularly unhealthy kind of body shape, and consumerism.

The talented actor-director Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster, the first live-action movie on the toy, Barbie, was banned in Vietnam(Film still)

The latest controversy, unexpectedly, is about a map.

The talented actor-director Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster, the first live-action movie on the toy, Barbie, was banned in Vietnam earlier this month because it showed a controversial map in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment during a scene in the film when Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) tells Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) how to get to the "real world".

Why did it get banned?

The map showed the “nine-dash line”, the imaginary border on the South China Sea (SCS), which China waves to make expansive claims over nearly 90% of the resource-rich waters of the maritime region: It is a claim that’s hotly contested by a number of China’s littoral neighbours including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan (a self-ruling democracy claimed by Beijing as a breakaway region).

China uses the line on official maps — based on even older maps — to claim vast portions of the SCS including areas, which Vietnam says are within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

“We do not grant a license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to be released in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the ‘nine-dash line’,” Vi Kien Thanh, cinema department head at Vietnam’s culture, sports and tourism ministry, told the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.

The film’s producer Warner Bros said the “child-like” drawing shown in the movie wasn’t significant.

“The map in Barbie Land is a whimsical, child-like crayon drawing,” the studio said, according to Reuters. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world. It was not intended to make any type of statement.”

Vietnam, however, didn't think so. Neither did the Philippines either: Manila first objected then allowed the movie to be screened after a request to the makers to blur the line in question.

It’s not the first time that Hanoi banned a Hollywood release because of a similar concern: In 2022, it banned the Tom Holland-starrer Uncharted, because the movie depicted the same, imaginary line.

What's the sensitivity?

Depicting the Beijing-drawn line means legitimising its claim that the waters and all land formations like islands, atolls and reefs within the line belong to China; it means Beijing has territorial and sovereign rights over them.

The other stakeholders in this ongoing dispute do not agree.

“China first officially tabled the nine-dash-line map to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in 2009,” Carlyle A. Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy and expert on Vietnam, said.

Since the Arbitral Tribunal Award in 2016 at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, in the case brought by the Philippines against China, Beijing has made it a point to print the line on Chinese passports and promote the map on t-shirts and desktop globes.

This, after not only refusing to participate in the Tribunal’s proceedings but also refusing to comply with the Award.

“Vietnam reacted by refusing to stamp Chinese passports with the offending map and issue visas on a separate sheet of paper. Vietnam also has taken an aggressive stance against any public displays of the map,” Thayer said.

Countries around the SCS are sensitive about sweeping Chinese claims not only because the maritime region is resource-rich but also because, critically, it is one of the most important sea trade routes globally.

An estimated $3.4 trillion in trade passed through the SCS in 2016, the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ initiative, ChinaPower has said in a report.

“These estimates represent a sizeable proportion of international trade, constituting between 21% of global trade in 2016…,” the report said.

The same report added that over 64% of China’s own maritime trade transited the waterway in 2016, making it a critical channel for the country.

That doesn’t, however, mean that Beijing can intimidate other countries into submitting to its SCS claims.

“China’s nine-dash line is ambiguous. The nine lines are not connected. No details are provided about latitude and longitude. It is unclear whether China is claiming all the water and land features with the nine lines or just the land features,” Thayer added.

Banning movies can only send a message to the international community – It can do nothing to stop China from militarising the SCS, building more structures on disputed islands or preventing Chinese maritime militia from provoking neighbouring states’ navies during their legitimate patrols.

“On the Vietnamese Barbie ban, I think that this a piece of political performance by the Vietnamese censors, attempting to demonstrate that the Vietnamese leadership is being tough on the SCS issue while actually doing very little in real terms so as to avoid upsetting Beijing,” said Bill Hayton, associate fellow at the Chatham House Asia-Pacific programme and author on books on China and Vietnam.

It’s five years since August 2018, when ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members and China reached an agreement on a landmark Single Draft Code of Conduct in the South China Sea Negotiating Text. The Single Draft Negotiating Text has just completed the second of three readings.

“The Code of Conduct (COC) is aimed at managing not settling maritime disputes. At least five major issues need to be resolved for an effective and binding COC: the geographic scope and disputed areas of coverage, the legal status of the COC, binding dispute resolution mechanism, enforcement mechanism, and the role of third parties,” Thayer said.

Resolving these issues alone will not address the militarisation of the SCS.

“The best that can be hoped for is an effective system of deterrence that prevents China from using force against claimant states,” Thayer added.

Meanwhile, Barbie is not quite in the pink of box office health in China, the second largest movie market in the world after the US. It had only made some $15 million on the mainland until the middle of this week (ending July 28).

Beijing, however, couldn't care less: Its SCS claims have now been legitimised in Barbie Land.