Disney’s ‘Mulan’ remake faces new boycott calls

Disney’s remake of Mulan faces fresh boycott calls after it emerged that some of the blockbuster scenes were filmed in Xinjiang, China, where widespread abuses against the rights of the region’s Muslim population have been widely documented. .

The lavish $ 200 million movie about a legendary Chinese warrior was already embroiled in a political controversy after star Liu Yifei voiced support for Hong Kong police while cracking down on democracy protests last year. But the latest furor erupted as soon as the credits stopped rolling after the movie began showing on the Disney + channel last week. Viewers saw that Disney included a “special thank you” to eight government entities in Xinjiang, including the public security bureau in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang where multiple internment camps have been documented. Another grateful entity was the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department in Xinjiang. The revelation has sparked renewed anger at a time of heightened scrutiny over Hollywood’s willingness to bow to authoritarian China.

Human rights groups, academics and journalists have denounced a harsh crackdown on Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims in Xinjiang, including mass internments, forced sterilizations, forced labor, as well as heavy religious and movement restrictions. Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society, said the film was now “possibly Disney’s most troublesome film” since Song of the South, a 1946 glorification of pre-war plantation life that the company has since retired. “It is surprising enough that it bears repeating,” he wrote in a Washington Post column. “Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security office in Xinjiang, a region in northwestern China that is the site of one of the worst human rights abuses in the world today.”