Ted Cruz Joins Growing Fury Over 'Barbie' Movie

Ted Cruz has spoken out over the controversy that led Vietnam to ban the upcoming Barbie movie. It is said the film features a map showing the nine-dash line that Beijing uses to represent its territorial claim over much of the South China Sea.

On Monday, Vi Kiến Thành, the head of Vietnam's Cinema Department, said the movie would not be released in his country because of what he termed "the illegal image of the 'cow's tongue line' in the film." This is Vietnamese slang for China's nine-dash line.

The ban is just the latest chapter in Hollywood's complicated relationship with China. It has seen major studios accused of ignoring human rights' concerns to gain access to the lucrative Chinese movie market.

On Twitter, Senator Cruz gave his opinion on the row. He quote-tweeted Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Foreign Policy Council thinktank, who shared a Reuters article on the controversy, commenting: "Warner Bros. Pictures bends the knee to the genocidal CCP [Chinese Communist Party] regime to make a buck."

The Texas Republican added, "I guess Barbie is made in China...," in a message that was viewed more than 122,000 times.

Barbie was due to be released in Vietnam on July 21, but this was canceled after it failed to get licensing approval from the country's National Film Appraisal and Classification Board, as is required for foreign movies. The film, directed by Greta Gerwig, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and also features Will Ferrell.

The New York Times reports that Vietnam Plus, a state-run Vietnamese newspaper, said that Barbie's alleged inclusion of the nine-dash line "distorts the truth, violates the law in general and violates sovereignty of Vietnamese territory in particular."

Newsweek has contacted Warner Bros, the studio that produced Barbie, for comment by email.

A number of other movies, including 2022 Sony action picture Uncharted, which featured Tom Holland, have previously been blocked from distribution in Vietnam for allegedly featuring the nine-dash line.

Beijing claims sovereignty over around 90 percent of the South China Sea, an area the size of Mexico, though this overlaps with rival claims from Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines.

To strengthen their position, the Chinese have been building military bases on uninhabited and, in some cases, artificially created, islands around the South China Sea. The Chinese territorial claim was rejected in 2016 by an international tribunal based in The Hague, but Beijing is continuing to reject its findings.

There are regular confrontations in the South China Sea between the militaries of China and various other powers, including the United States. On June 3, a Chinese warship nearly hit a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Taiwan Strait, which separates mainland China from the island state of Taiwan, which Beijing also claims sovereignty over. The Chinese vessel "executed maneuvers in an unsafe manner," close to the U.S.S. Chung-Hoon, which was accompanied by a Canadian frigate. This was according to the U.S. Navy's Indo-Pacific Command.