Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday accused the new “Barbie” movie of “kissing up to the Chinese Communist Party,” during an appearance on Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
In one scene that displays a whimsical map, a nine-dash line is shown next to China that signifies Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea.
Admitting he didn’t see the film, just the “stupid map,” Cruz explained the problem to viewers.
"As you just showed, the map is drawn in crayons. It’s roughly a map of the world, but China, you know, Asia is just this big crayon box. But then right to the east of where China is are the nine dashes, and to anyone who’s not really focused on geopolitics, those lines don’t mean anything, but what those lines indicate is the communist party of China puts out official maps with those nine dashes and they are asserting sovereignty over the entire South China Sea.
"They’re saying all of that is China’s, and by the way, all of their neighbors disagree," he added, noting that the film has been banned in Vietnam.
To them, the nine-dash line “symbolizes a brazen act of imperialist bullying that elevates Chinese national interest over an older shared set of interests of socialist brotherhood,” Peter Zinoman, a professor of history and Southeast Asian studies at UC Berkeley, explained to Vox.
As Cruz and Watters go on to discuss, clearly no child watching the movie will even notice the lines, let alone what they mean.
"This is really designed for the eyes of the Chinese censors and they’re trying to kiss up to the Chinese Communist Party because they want to make money selling the movie in China," Cruz added.
Ted Cruz puts Barbie on notice. pic.twitter.com/ix57so6ym6
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) July 20, 2023
Warner Bros has defended the map, claiming in a statement to Reuters that "the doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the real world" and that "it was not intended to make any type of statement.”
But Cruz isn't the only Republican calling out the film for including the Chinese propaganda.
“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 CCP censors," Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin told Politico.