Disney shot movie scenes near detention camps

The China Letter: September 11, 2020

Sep 11, 2020

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This weekend, Disney revealed that some scenes from its "Mulan" remake were filmed in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is engaged in a campaign of cultural and demographic genocide.

axios.comDisney’s Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang amid cultural genocideDisney thanks the Chinese Communist Party in the film credits.

The live-action remake of Disney’s animated classic Mulan premiered with a plot twist: the credits thank several government entities in in Xinjiang, the province in which the detainment of a million people, mostly Muslim Uighurs, has been the subject of recent attention. But the studio hasn’t said much in response to questions about it.

SCMP News @SCMPNews

Coronavirus, boycotts and controversy: Disney’s #Mulan likely to bomb in China

scmp.comDisney’s controversy-ridden live-action Mulan set to bomb in ChinaDisney’s live-action Mulan has been boycotted over scenes filmed in Xinjiang and Liu Yifei’s comments about the Hong Kong protests, the cinematic release was cancelled because of Covid-19, and presales figures are disastrous.

While it was approved for screening in Chinese theatres, advance ticket sales for Mulan lead to predictions that it will bomb at the box office there. (At the same time, it’s been criticized for mishandling the culture of its setting.) China’s moviegoers seem to prefer The Eight Hundred, a war epic set at the 1937 start of the Sino-Japanese War.

Seeding serious concern

Jason Koebler @jason_koebler

I filed FOIAs about the Chinese Mystery Seeds with state departments of agriculture in all 50 states. I received thousands of emails, spreadsheets, complaint forms, presentations, voicemails. The takeaway is that MANY Americans planted the seeds

vice.comHundreds of Americans Planted ‘Chinese Mystery Seeds’What I learned by reading thousands of internal emails about the Chinese mystery seeds.

Mystery seeds sent from China to households across the U.S. this summer were feared to be a virus or invasive species, but news reports identified them as generally innocuous plants. Still, the complaints filed with state agricultural departments detail how they caused a panic, which might have been the only intention.

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The media in the middle

The Age @theage

The Chinese government has always tried to shield itself from foreign correspondents, says Peter Ellingsen, China correspondent from 1988 to 1991. "What has changed is that China has become immensely powerful and Xi Jinping is taking them to the brink."

ow.ly‘Just appalling’: End of an era as Australia’s last journalists in China forced outAustralia could be without journalists in China for some years after the last two were forced out by security fears, but China says they are still welcome.

Bill Birtles and Mike Smith were the last two reporters working in China for Australian media, until they were hastily flown home. (Beijing then claimed the homes of four Chinese journalists working in Australia had their homes raided.) Plus, two Chinese scholars had their visas revoked by Australia.

The Conversation @ConversationEDU

The Australia-China relationship is unravelling faster than we could have imagined. The big danger: the erosion of the economic and people-to-people ties that once held the relationship together. @j_laurenceson @acri_uts @UTSEngage

theconversation.comWhy the Australia-China relationship is unravelling faster than we could have imaginedAs diplomatic relations worsened in recent years, people-to-people ties remained strong. Now, however, it appears even academics and journalists are becoming ‘pawns’ in a great diplomatic tussle.

One smearing experience

The New Yorker @NewYorker

.@JiayangFan writes about caring for her mother, who was diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2011, through the pandemic: "My mother was now incarcerated in a body that was conﬁned in a sealed facility, which was trapped inside a locked-down city."

nyer.cmHow My Mother and I Became Chinese PropagandaImmigrant struggles in America forged a bond that became even tighter after my mother’s A.L.S. diagnosis. Then, as COVID-19 threatened, Chinese nationalists began calling us traitors to our country.

New Yorker journalist Jiayang Fan wrote this lengthy personal story about how she became a massive target on Chinese social media during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York. After tweeting about her struggles to communicate with her mother in a nursing home, online chatter from China portrayed them both as traitors.

The last words, for now

Development of a space program in China has been as enshrouded in mystery, but its state-run media outlets lifted the veil on a “reusable experimental spacecraft.” The secretive recent mission involved two days in low-Earth orbit, and coincided with the release of something surveillance spotted: