Versión Español
Spanish – Cinema and politics have a close relationship. How we see countries on the big screen helps to forge our judgment about them. In Mulan’s case, Disney exalts an epic story that hides a desolate present.
About one million Uighurs, the Muslim minority in Xinjiang, China, where Disney filmed its latest production, have faced abuses in concentration camps, forced sterilization, organ removal, and other humiliations.
“Imposing measures to prevent births within the group” fits the legal definition of genocide, notes Isaac Stone of the Asia Society Center for U.S.-China Relations in an opinion column in The Washington Post.
He denounces how Disney is helping to normalize crimes against humanity and highlights how the situation meets the criteria for classification as genocide since the birth rate in Xinjiang plummeted by 24% in 2019.
‘HORRIFIC’: Asia analyst @GordonGChang sounds off on Disney and the production of new live-action movie Mulan, citing China’s concentration camps, and their military threat to the US. [with Newsmax TV’s @JohnFBachman. https://t.co/VlT7z8drtO] pic.twitter.com/tm3JwQTeTJ
— Newsmax (@newsmax) September 8, 2020
The normalization of the abuses of the Communist Party of China is not limited to the location of the filming. The film also thanks the propaganda departments of the regime in the end credits.
For those unfamiliar with the role of the Propaganda Department, in March 2020, when the pandemic first broke out worldwide, the Chinese Communist Party announced that it had won the “People’s War” against the coronavirus. It even published a book translated into six languages in which China provided advice to the world to replicate its supposed success in defeating the spread of COVID-19.
However, on Friday, April 17, it was reported that the death toll was actually 50% higher than originally acknowledged in Wuhan, the city where the pandemic originated.
Conventionally, Disney stories have heroes. But this time, it has chosen to favor the executioner. In the credits, Disney offers special thanks to more than a dozen Chinese institutions that helped with the film, including four propaganda departments of the Communist Party of China in the Xinjiang region, as well as the Public Security Bureau of the city of Turpan in the same region, organizations that are facilitating crimes against humanity.
That is why Isaac Stone Fish insists in his column: “It is sufficiently astonishing that it bears repeating: Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today.”
In the city of Turpan, for example, the location of the film, there are “re-education” camps for the Uighur ethnic minority. In 2017, the campaign began with a detailed question and answer guide. When students question party members about their parents being removed from their home, the response was: “They have very good conditions for studying and living there, and you have nothing to worry about.”
Fawning over the Chinese Communist Party has brought benefits to Disney, such as the opening of Shanghai Disneyland in June 2016. According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, it is the “biggest opportunity the company has had since Walt Disney himself bought a piece of land in Central Florida (where Disney World is located).”
Disney has made a point to cajole the regime after a collision in 1997 when the production company released a film about the Dalai Lama.
We made a stupid mistake in releasing ‘Kundun,’” the then-CEO of Disney Michael Eisner told Premier Zhu Rongji in October 1998. “Here I want to apologize, and in the future, we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening,” the Washington Post reported.
The religious leader lives in exile since communism has an atheistic essence (it worships the State). That is why it persecutes both Muslims and Buddhist leaders.
Now that China’s image is deteriorating because of the coronavirus pandemic and the censorship against doctors and journalists who tried to warn of the danger in time, Disney is trying to “correct” its “mistake” of the past, with publicity in China’s favor.
