When the matchmaker calls roll in the iconic scene in my favorite Disney princess movie, my answer will be “not present.”
No, I won’t buy a ticket — and certainly not Disney Plus access — to see the new live-action “Mulan,” which released online Sept. 4. Disney’s latest endeavor was largely shot in Xinjiang, a northwestern province in China where more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims are currently held in internment camps by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a propaganda product for which the company should be ashamed.
Ironically, “Mulan” is the one princess whom leftist media has paraded for decades as truly “feminist,” while “Cinderella” and “Snow White” promoted the so-called regressive female norms perpetuated by a patriarchal society. Yet the latest take on Disney’s most egalitarian princess was funded by one of the most anti-equality regimes in the world today.
It’s not simply that the brand has financially supported a horrific regime which currently enslaves religious minorities, silences dissidents, and oppresses its own people. Because of China’s lucrative market for American films, Disney — not to mention Netflix and most of Hollywood — has been tied to China’s purse-strings for years.
As The Heritage Foundation’s Tim Doescher has pointed out, “our films are being written with China in mind.” Directors of “Top Gun: Maverick” removed a Taiwainese symbol from Tom Cruise’s jacket in one of Hollywood’s latest efforts to ensure continued access to China’s movie-goers.
But until 2018, so long as you avoided the three Ts — Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen — you were OK. Now there’s a fourth item: Xinjiang.
What makes “Mulan” particularly disturbing is its directors’ and actors’ blatant praise of Chinese state authorities, like when Chinese-American star Yifei Liu (a.k.a. Crystal Liu) sided with Hong Kong police over pro-democracy protesters last year during a crackdown on demonstrations. The directors’ willful blindness to the atrocities committed in Xinjiang shows that for Hollywood, profit always comes before principle.
Many Americans have heard of the Uyghur internment camps, but widespread knowledge of the atrocities the CCP is committing in Xinjiang was not immediate. The barbed-wire-lined compounds China calls “re-education camps” were created for the purpose of Sinocising, or making more Chinese, the Uyghur Muslims living in the Xinjiang province.
These camps were discovered in 2018, but may have existed for a while before that point.
Meanwhile, an unknown number of Uyghurs — we now know at least 1 million — continue to be identified and targeted via China’s face-recognition technology. They are then forced to labor and recite Chinese propaganda as a part of their “re-education” process and taught to think, speak, and act only for China. Much of this “training” involves forcing Muslims to violate their religious practices, like wearing beards or abstention from certain types of meat and alcohol.
The CCP describes its detention of 1 million Uyghur citizens as a “quarantine” for the “disease” of being “infected by unhealthy thoughts.”
Since 2018, many have since decried China’s senior party leaders for their behavior. The United States passed a law this year condemning China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority. Yet thousands of businesses, especially in the film industry, continue to shake hands with the Uyghurs’ captors, presumably in exchange for another round of pocket-linings.
Did Mulan’s directors simply not notice the forced labor camps in the province where they filmed, or did they agree to keep their mouths shut — and praise CCP authorities in the movie’s credits — in exchange for shooting there?
The film credits’ “China Special Thanks” list included the “Publicity Department of CPC Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Committee” and displays that the film was “supervised by China Film Co-Production Corporation.”
The director didn’t praise just any party leader, either. He praised the police security bureau in Turpan — the bureau reportedly tasked with running some of the Uyghur internment camps, and which “was blacklisted last year along with other Chinese law enforcement agencies by the U.S. Commerce Department, prohibiting U.S. companies from selling or supplying products to them,” Vox reported.
Even CNN admitted this was a bad look for Disney. In a commentary segment on Sept. 13, network host Jake Tapper called out Disney’s “problematic” choice of thanking “the propaganda authorities of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang” in the movie credits.
Disney Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy defended the brand’s praise of China in the “Mulan” movie credits as standard procedure in the film industry, which only furthers the point.
Disney may be OK with propping up a murderous communist regime, but American consumers should not be.
Carmel Kookogey is a senior George Washington Fellow studying politics. She is the editor-in-chief of the Collegian.
