Why calls to boycott ‘Mulan’ over concerns about China are growing

Disney’s live-action remake of “Mulan” has drawn a fresh wave of criticism for being filmed partly in Xinjiang, the region in China where Uighur Muslims have been detained in mass internment camps.

The outcry was the latest example of how the new film, which was released on Disney+ over the weekend, has become a magnet for anger over the Chinese Communist Party’s policies promoting nationalism and ethnic Han chauvinism.

For months, the film has faced calls for a boycott by supporters of the Hong Kong antigovernment protests after the movie’s star, Liu Yifei, said she backed the city’s police, who have been criticised for their use of force against pro-democracy demonstrators.

Last month, as Disney ramped up promotion for the new film, supporters of the Hong Kong protests anointed Agnes Chow, a prominent democracy activist who was recently arrested under the territory’s new national security law, as their own, “real” Mulan. The criticism of the movie this week also points to broader concerns about China’s aggressive efforts to assimilate minorities, leading to rapid cultural erosion.

Such fears drove protests last week that erupted in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region over a new education policy that would reduce the teaching of the Mongolian language in local schools in favour of Chinese, the language used by the dominant Han ethnic majority.

The latest backlash against Mulan began Monday, when several social media users noticed that in the film’s credits, Disney thanked six government entities in Xinjiang, a region in China’s far west that is home to the Uighurs. The predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic minority have lived for years under increasingly expansive surveillance and repression in the region.

The entities mentioned in the movie’s credits included the police bureau in Turpan, an ancient Silk Road city in eastern Xinjiang.

The details of Disney’s partnership with the authorities in Xinjiang are unclear. The company did not respond to an emailed request for comment Tuesday morning. Calls to the regional and local propaganda departments in Xinjiang and Turpan on Tuesday also went unanswered.

“Mulan” is scheduled to be released in theatres in China on Friday. But the timing of the preproduction and the filming suggest that the cast and crew may have been in Xinjiang after the government expanded its crackdown in the region in 2017.

Production for the movie, which is about a Chinese folk heroine who disguises herself as a man to stand in for her ailing father in the army, reportedly began in 2018, with filming taking place mostly in China and New Zealand.

The Chinese Communist Party has rejected international criticism of the internment camps in Xinjiang and has described them as job-training centres that are necessary to fight Islamic extremism. But leaked documents and testimonies by former detainees have described a ruthless and coercive environment in which physical and verbal abuse, as well as grinding indoctrination sessions, are widespread.

Human rights advocates and legal scholars have called the crackdown in Xinjiang the worst collective human rights abuse in China in decades.

Grant Major, the film’s production designer, recently told Architectural Digest that the production team spent months in and around Xinjiang to do research before filming. In September 2017, Niki Caro, the film’s director, posted a photo of a vast desert landscape on her Instagram with the location marked as “Asia/Urumqi.” Urumqi is the capital of Xinjiang.

The area surrounding Turpan, in addition to being known for its vast, rugged landscapes, is also the site of a number of detention camps. That includes the earliest documented case of what China has called “transformation through education” targeting Muslims, from August 2013, said Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington who has studied Chinese policies toward the Uighurs.

In 2016, Zhu Hailun, a former deputy party secretary in Xinjiang, inspected Turpan’s “centralised re-education de-extremification” work, which Zenz said was an indication that “the region was an early leading example of such work.” Zhu was one of a group of Chinese officials sanctioned by the Trump administration in July for human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

“This film was undertaken with the assistance of the Chinese police while at the same time these police were committing crimes against the Uighur people in Turpan,” said Tahir Imin, a Uighur activist based in Washington. “Every big company in America needs to think about whether their business is helping the Chinese government oppress the Uighur people.”

Disney, which has long eyed China’s booming box office and growing middle class, has a history of running into political sensitivities in China. In 1996, the company was shut out of China’s film market after it angered officials with its backing of “Kundun,” Martin Scorsese’s 1997 film that is seen to be sympathetic to the Dalai Lama.

The release of Disney’s original “Mulan” animated film from 1998 was delayed for a year as a result. It was not until Disney bought the foreign distribution rights to two Chinese feature films, hired a Chinese performance troupe to participate in the European release of “Mulan” and floated the idea of opening a theme park in the country that Chinese officials finally approved the release of the film in February 1999. Later that year, Disney announced plans to build a park in Hong Kong.

Disney is just the latest American company to come under fire for its affiliation with Xinjiang. In July, an ESPN investigation described reports of abuse of young players at the National Basketball Association’s player-development training camps in China, including in Xinjiang. After the investigation was published, the NBA acknowledged for the first time it had closed its Xinjiang academy, but declined to say whether human rights had been a factor.

Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company, has also sold medical equipment used by the police in Xinjiang to collect DNA from Uighurs for social control purposes. Last year, the company, in the wake of criticism, said it would stop selling its gear to the authorities in Xinjiang.

On Monday, calls to boycott “Mulan” began growing on social media. Among the critics was Joshua Wong, a prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, who accused Disney of kowtowing to Beijing. Supporters in Thailand and Taiwan had also urged a boycott of the movie, citing concerns about China’s growing influence in the region. The pro-democracy movement has become known as the #milkteaalliance, named after their shared love for the drink.

© 2020 New York Times News Service