The Unexpected Geopolitical Lessons of Vietnam’s Barbie Ban

I n a bizarre collision of pop culture and geopolitics, Vietnam has banned Barbie — yes, Barbie, a comedy film about the eponymous children’s doll — from domestic distribution. Not for the first time, Vietnam has taken offense at a Hollywood studio’s alleged acquiescence to China’s preferred portrayal of its “nine-dash line” — a notional boundary in what Hanoi calls the East Sea and Beijing calls the South China Sea. That in this instance the map in question is a cartoon bearing little resemblance to the real geographic layout of maritime Southeast Asia makes Vietnam’s ban more peculiar than its 2022 ban of Uncharted and its joint 2019 ban, with the Philippines and Malaysia, of Abominable. Farcical though this imbroglio may be, important considerations for U.S. policy-makers are contained herein, among them China’s deployment of “sharp power,” its threat to a free and open Indo-Pacific, and the drawbacks of a values-only foreign policy.

China’s sharp power — its efforts to pierce the political and information environments of other countries — has long targeted Hollywood. Through threats of banning films from its gargantuan market, China’s Communist Party wields power over filmmakers in the ostensibly free world. The 2012 reboot of Red Dawn exemplifies the allure of appeasing Beijing. With the film already in post-production, MGM replaced China as the antagonist with North Korea. Blockbusters like Skyfall and Iron Man 3 have sought to avoid that fate by presenting China with special edits that contain no offending material, but often the effect is to avoid China’s displeasure altogether by crafting scripts to its taste. Though it is impossible to judge the dash-adorned map in Barbie — again, it is cartoon-like — as a definitive nod to Beijing, it is not difficult to imagine that China’s sharp power really did factor into Warner Brothers’ design choices.

Those dashes — eight on Barbie’s map, nine on Beijing’s — are a not-so-subtle threat to Vietnam, other South China Sea littoral states, and the rest of the Indo-Pacific mega-region. The nine-dash line etches a maritime zone over which Beijing claims sovereignty. The problem is that the line extends more than 700 nautical miles from China’s southernmost province of Hainan, subsumes almost the entirety of the international body of water, and encroaches upon the more modest claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Beijing wants to turn the sea into a Chinese lake, truncating freedom of navigation and seizing the sea’s enticing fisheries and fossil-fuel reservoirs.

Tempting though it is to view South China Sea conflicts through an ideological lens amid heightened Sino-American competition, this cartographic controversy is longstanding; in fact, it predates the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. In the 1930s, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government produced a map with even more expansive claims allegedly based on Imperial China’s dominion over the waters of its near abroad. Contemporary China has been pushing the limits of its neighbors’ accommodation since the Hu Jintao era. During the Xi Jinping era, it has militarized spits of land in contested waters and marshaled archaeological finds to its cause. China’s actions reflect its own considerations of regional power and geoeconomics — realist concerns, in other words.

In challenging Beijing’s expansive nine-dash-line claims, Vietnam, its littoral neighbors, and the United States and its Northeast Asian allies share a clear, similarly realist interest: Denying China regional hegemony allows for the aforementioned states’ continued independence and prosperity. And here, the Barbie ban brouhaha reveals an incoherence in the Biden administration’s foreign policy. President Biden describes a world in which the central conflict pits democracy against autocracy. China, of course, would anchor the autocratic camp in this conception of world politics. Vietnam, however, must be consigned to that hostile camp too, should we accept the premise. As Americans of a certain generation will have no trouble recalling, the Vietnamese communists share few of our values. Though not as totalizing as its larger rival to the north, the regime in Hanoi is repressive. In the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index for 2022, Vietnam is buried at number 132 out of the 165 countries evaluated, beneath even notorious human-rights abusers like Russian and Nicaragua. And it is moving in the wrong direction, with its score falling slightly since the 2021 iteration. The regime’s banning of Barbie on such tenuous grounds reflects its authoritarian nature.

Yet, Vietnam remains a crucial partner in America’s marathon against the pacing challenge of China. Amid the public-private effort to “de-risk” and “friendshore” international trade, Vietnam has emerged as an economic high ground — and deservedly so. Since initiating the Doi Moi economic reforms of the 1980s, Vietnam has proven stable and reliable. According to World Bank data, the country’s per capita GDP has more than trebled in the past two decades, and its GDP is expected to rise another 6.3 percent this year. As the Economist noted in a recent issue, Vietnamese students now outperform their counterparts in countries like Britain and Canada. Vietnam’s impressive industrialization and high educational performance make it a rising economic counterweight to China, and fertile soil for foreign direct investment. To its credit, the White House recognizes Vietnam’s importance economically and strategically, lauding it where appropriate. This spring President Biden phoned Vietnamese Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to reinforce “the United States’ commitment to a strong, prosperous, resilient, and independent Vietnam.”

The president’s Vietnam triangulation reveals a savvy, latent realism in his foreign policy. And yet the administration remains simultaneously encumbered by his democratic Manicheanism. America’s foreign policy will always be values-weighted — and rightly so. But to superciliously broadcast the virtue of our preferred liberal, democratic form of politics while ignoring affronts to it when convenient is incoherent. At its least harmful, this cheapens our values; at its most harmful, it actively repels states we want in the fold against China. While Vietnam is unlikely to fall under Beijing’s sway anytime soon, the Indo-Pacific is chock-a-block with countries that might, if chided too scathingly for their domestic shortcomings. As the Barbie ban spat shows, there is more to geopolitics than democracy and autocracy.