The end credits of Disney's live-action remake of 'Mulan' (2020) specifically thanked the Publicity department of Communist Party of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Committee. That's the public security bureau that administers the 're-education' camps in Turpan, east of Xinjiang, People's Republic of China. The film was partly shot in Xinjiang. Disney and 'Mulan' have been roundly criticized for filming in Xinjiang where Uyghurs live in fear and have to adhere to strict regulations set by the Chinese government.
Uyghur internment camps exist. These are no longer whispers or a myth. 'Re-education', Chinese government officials tout the party line. This isn't just an America versus China thing. A country's rules are one thing, but to haul people away into concentration camps, that's a whole new ball game. China has defended its actions by calling it a tactic to deal with Islamic extremism. Southeast Asia is keeping remarkably quiet about what China is doing to its Uyghur and Muslim population. (Tibet and Mongolia too.)
Jeanette Ng of The Foreign Policy thought the film's scriptwriters to have turned out shoddy work, creating a mishmash of geographic towns and myths that are largely non-historical. She wrote about the film in an essay published on September 8, 2020. It's a succinct and well-analyzed piece titled ‘Mulan’ Has a Message: Serve China and Forget About the Uighurs'.
Even before the film—which was not previously known to have been filmed in Xinjiang—arrived, it had blundered right into politics. Two of the film’s stars, Liu Yifei (Mulan) and Donnie Yen (Commander Tung), have voiced their support of the Hong Kong police against the city’s pro-democracy protests, thus sparking an online movement to boycott the film. Its arrival on Disney+ the weekend that Hong Kongers were supposed to have an election, now delayed as the city instead cracks down on dissidents and democrats, adds more symbolic weight.
But the rotten heart of Mulan as a film, rather than its production process, is the accidental regurgitation of China’s current nationalist myths as part of a messy, confused, and boring film. The title card fades into a location said to be the “Silk Road, Northwest China.” This is, of course, Xinjiang—here set up by the narrative frame as an inalienable part of China that Mulan must defend for her father, her family, and her emperor. That’s not the historical reality—or even the reality of the original poem the stories are based on, which depicts Mulan as the servant of a khan of the Northern Wei dynasty, not an all-powerful Chinese emperor.
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But the film isn’t interested in actually being in conversation with that vast tradition. Occasionally it borrows a name, such as Gong Li’s shapeshifting witch, who shares the name of another cross-dressing woman warrior in the Romance of the Tang and Sui.
But it draws no meaning from these borrowings. Instead it defaults to a series of clichés the screenwriters seem to think represent Chinese culture; po-faced duty, filial piety, magic fights. And yet it arrives at the most depressing and narrow version of the story possible: Service to the emperor will absolve you of all your deviant faults. Perhaps that was the lesson Disney chose to heed when they made their location decisions.
All I have to say is, it's Disney. It's America. Then it's China. How could we have expected anything else but crap to come out of it? There's propaganda from all parties involved. Sure, there's more to this than simply being offended by it. But what's the best way to hit Disney with a stark message of displeasure? Don't watch it! Let the ratings drop! Let the box office takings plummet. (Hopefully the production crew got paid.) Please, it's a stupid movie that we can all ignore.
My mother, Gulshan Abbas, a Uighur retired medical doctor, was abducted from her home in Urumqi on Sept. 11, 2018. Urumqi is just 119 miles from Turpan — a city that is credited in the recently released live-action Disney interpretation of “Mulan.” (The credit sequence of the film thanks Turpan’s public safety bureau, which is responsible for the camps in the area, and other government entities in Xinjiang.) For the past two years, I have struggled to get any information on my mother’s whereabouts, and I can’t help but wonder if my mother is being held in one of the concentration camps in Turpan.
Our homeland is beautiful and picturesque in many ways, boasting ideal scenery for shooting a movie. But it is also a place where journalists do not have access, information is censored and criticism is silenced. I myself have been denied any information about my mother’s condition or location. My mother believed that living a simple, peaceful life in service to others was the only protection from trouble she needed. But trouble came to find her all the same. This trouble was aided and funded by corporations that valued Chinese blood money more than integrity and human lives.
The actors Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Gong Li, Cheng Pei-Pei, and Jason Scott Lee and such, are respected Asian and Asian-American actors. It's inconceivable that they don't know what they're filming or the messages that they're sending. Perhaps they knowingly participated in 'Mulan' for the hype, for the glitz, for a salary, or to be obedient citizens to China, regardless of their permanent residency in ahemmm, some other rumored country. Pulling out of a film halfway without a solid reason (someone in the family died or they got injured) is detrimental to their career; which will be over in three seconds, when they piss off China.
The comments by people who've watched the film and all the trailers sent me into peals of laughter. Damn hilarious. I'll pass on watching this film for now, unless the film is readily accessible to me beyond Disney+. Hahaha. 'Mulan' is released on Disney+, which is region-locked. I ain't jumping through hoops to get Disney+ in order to watch it. It's released in a few theaters in Singapore, but I'm not going to step into any bloody cinema for till at least June 2021.
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