Bridget Bennett/AFP via Getty
The upcoming Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has been banned from domestic distribution in Vietnam, the country’s state media reported Monday, because the film includes a scene featuring a map showing China’s unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea.
The so-called “nine-dash line” is used in Chinese maps to depict a huge U-shaped area in the sea—among the most economically and geostrategically important bodies of water in the world—which it claims as its own in contravention of international law. China has continued to uphold its historic rights claim on the area, which partly falls in what Vietnam considers its own coastal shelf, despite an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016 finding that China has “no legal basis” to its rights claim on the vast resources in the area.
“We do not grant license for the American movie ‘Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” Vietnam’s state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, the head of a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.