Barbie Map: Political Commentary or Coincidence?

What's the story?

• As Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" blockbuster is being released in theaters today, Warner Bros. is addressing the film's geopolitical implications. 
• Vietnam banned the film after a Barbie trailer was released earlier this summer showing a hand-drawn map of the "real world." The map shows unrealistic outlines of the continents and countries, along with doodles meant to show a child's handiwork. 
• Coincidentally, the map depicts a line with eight dashes coming off of Asia, which Vietnam argued looks too similar to the "nine-dash line" — an unofficial and contentious border in the sea between China and Vietnam's territory that has caused tension between the two nations. 

The nine-dash line

• The nine-dash line cuts across the South China Sea, a waterway between China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The line extends from the Chinese mainland and Hainan Island deep into the sea, running adjacent to Vietnam's coast and the Philippines. 
• The maritime boundary has been featured on Chinese maps since the 1940s, unevenly splitting a larger section of the sea as Chinese territory. The issue is legally ambiguous, and sovereignty over the region remains unresolved. 
• Various organizations and governing bodies have claimed that the nine-dash line has no validity, including the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2016, and so on. 

What they're saying

• Professor Peter Zinoman at U.C. Berkeley told Vox:

"To the Chinese, the nine-dash line signifies their legitimate claims to the South China Sea. To the Vietnamese, it symbolizes a brazen act of imperialist bullying that elevates Chinese national interest over an older shared set of interests of socialist brotherhood."

• A New York University professor, Kevin Li, said:

"As if the balancing act of stoking and restraining domestic nationalism wasn't hard enough, pressure from an outside voice actively calling the government's legitimacy into question on territorial grounds complicates things further. The Republic of Vietnam had, after all, fought the Chinese for [the South China Sea] during the last years of the Vietnam War. In my view, banning [Barbie] was a no-brainer."

• Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have criticized the movie, and the entire industry, for the map. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) said:

"While it may just be a Barbie map in a Barbie world, the fact that a cartoonish, crayon-scribbled map seems to go out of its way to depict the PRC's unlawful territorial claims illustrates the pressure that Hollywood is under to please [Chinese Communist Party (CCP)] censors."

• A spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Bethany Stevens, said:

"China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think, and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing CCP propaganda—just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map."

• In response to the criticism, Warner Bros. said:

"The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing. 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."

What do you think? Do you think the Barbie movie intended to make a political statement?

-Jamie Epstein