‘I Guess Barbie Is Made in China’: Ted Cruz Blasts Hollywood for Catering to CCP in New Blockbuster

Ted Cruz blasted Warner Bros. Pictures after Vietnam announced it was banning the distribution of the film Barbie because it shows a map featuring contested territory claimed by China.

“I guess Barbie is made in China…” Cruz tweeted following the news.

The controversy surrounds a scene in the picture featuring a fantastical “World Map” with a crude outline of the “nine-dash line,” a contested swath of the South China Sea unilaterally claimed by the People’s Republic of China that includes the Spratly and Paracel Islands.

“We do not grant [a] license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line,” the state-sponsored media outlet, Tuoi Tre, reported on Monday.

The development led Representative Mark Green (R., Tenn.), whose bill – Stopping Communist Regimes from Engaging in Edits Now (SCREEN) Act – aims to protect Hollywood studios from Chinese pressure, to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.

“The CCP’s censorship reaches across the entirety of our film industry. That’s why my SCREEN Act is so essential — to ensure taxpayers never subsidize this censorship,” the lawmaker told National Review.

Vietnam’s decision to boycott the film has sparked lawmakers in other East Asian countries to openly contemplate a similar course of action.

“The movie is fiction, and so is the nine-dash line. At the minimum, our cinemas should include an explicit disclaimer that the nine-dash line is a figment of China’s imagination,” Philipino Senator Risa Hontiveros said during a talk on Tuesday.

A similar note was struck by fellow Philippines Senator Francis Tolentino. “If the invalidated nine-dash line was indeed depicted in the movie Barbie, then it is incumbent upon the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board of the Philippines to ban the same as it denigrates Philippine sovereignty,” the legislator told CNN’s local news affiliate.

Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei also lay claim to various stretches of the South China Sea.

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, downplayed the controversy while underscoring the country’s territorial posture during a press conference on Tuesday.

“China’s position on the South China Sea issue is clear and consistent,” the official said, adding that Vietnam “should not link the South China Sea issue with normal cultural exchange.”

This isn’t the first time the 9-Dash Line has been inserted into an American film. In 2019, a DreamWorks Animation production, Abominable, similarly presented a regional map of Asia with the controversial borderline prominently featured.

American legislators have grown increasingly alarmed by the pressure Chinese censors exert on filmmakers since revelations last March that the makers of Top Gun: Maverick had removed images of Taiwanese and Japanese flag patches from Maverick’s bomber jacket to please the Chinese Communist Party.

Last week, the Department of Defense announced it would no longer work with film studios that censor movies to placate the CCP.

The Pentagon “will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China . . . to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China,” an agency document first obtained by Politico reads.

New guidelines instituted by the DoD ensure that any forthcoming projects greenlit by the department will have an officer work directly with the production’s leadership. If the Chinese government insists on any alterations to the film, the official must be notified “in writing of such a censorship demand, including the terms of such demand, and whether the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand for such censorship.”

The policy update drew the approval of Representative Green.

“I applaud the Pentagon’s decision not to provide production assistance to film studios that allow the CCP to censor their content. American tastes and opinions should guide film studios’ creative decisions, not an adversarial nation’s political interests,” the Tennessee lawmaker told National Review on Monday.