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Disney’s ‘Mulan’ remake faces fresh boycott calls

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

Disney’s ‘Mulan’ remake faces fresh boycott calls
Actress Yifei Liu, who plays Mulan in the movie’s title role, has been criticized for voicing support for Hong Kong’s police in tackling protesters.

The lavish $200 million film about a legendary female Chinese warrior was already tangled in political controversy after star Liu Yifei voiced support for Hong Kong’s police as they cracked down on democracy protests last year.

But the latest furor exploded as soon as the credits stopped rolling after the movie began showing on the Disney+ channel last week.

Viewers spotted that Disney included “special thanks” 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 entity thanked was the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department in Xinjiang.

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The revelation has sparked renewed anger at a time of heightened scrutiny over Hollywood’s willingness to bow to authoritarian China.

Rights groups, academics, and journalists have exposed a harsh crackdown against Uighur and Kazakh Muslims in Xinjiang, including mass internments, enforced sterilizations, forced labor as well as intense religious and movement restrictions.

Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society, said the film was now “arguably Disney’s most problematic movie” since Song of the South —a 1946 glorification of antebellum plantation life that the company has since pulled.

“It’s sufficiently astonishing that it bears repeating,” he wrote in a Washington Post column.

“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.”

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