Benedict Rogers: Mulan gets into bed with CCP

The new Disney film Mulan is arousing strong passions – and profound misunderstandings. And much of it relates to the confusion some people seem to have between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a regime and China as a country. Despite what the regime tells you, the two are not the same.

Let me be very clear from the start. I love China, Chinese people, Chinese history, Chinese culture – and I love Hong Kong, Hong Kong people, Hong Kong’s history and Hong Kong’s culture. I have spent much of my adult life in and around China and Hong Kong, after I first went to teach English in the east-coast city of Qingdao at the age of 18.

I have studied the language (sporadically and poorly), made many Chinese friends and cook Chinese food. I have travelled throughout China, from Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou to Kunming, Dali, Ruili and Guilin, from Shenyang to Shenzhen, from Guangzhou to Beijing. I have criss-crossed China many times, on trains and planes. I have slept on the Great Wall of China and walked through the Forbidden City at midnight. I need no lessons from anyone in appreciation for China.

Years ago I spent many hours making dumplings with Chinese friends, during Britain’s COVID-19 lockdown I spent time practising traditional Chinese characters and last week-end I had my first mahjong lesson with Hong Kong friends.

I am as unsinophobic – indeed anti-sinophobic – as they come.

Yet on Tuesday this week the former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, raised in the House of Commons concerns about Disney’s collaboration with the CCP in the production of Mulan. Specifically, the fact that it has now emerged that Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang, where the regime is perpetrating mass atrocities against the Uyghurs.

Within hours, a British barrister – a Queen’s Counsel no less – tweeted that this was an example of “Sinophobia”. To his credit, after a barrage of criticism, the author of the tweet took it down, but he has yet to issue an apology.

Since he has taken it down, I won’t embarrass him by naming him. I hope he will take time to re-think. But I ask readers: would criticism of the Nazis, outrage at the Holocaust, protest at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, horror at the gas chambers ever be described as “Germanphobia”? I think not.

And yet Disney has made a film in a region of China where atrocities are being committed which the Jewish community itself has compared with the Holocaust.

Comparisons with the Holocaust are understandably sensitive – Jews rightly regard it as an entirely unique tragedy. So for the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, along with many Jews, to make that comparison speaks volumes.

In a letter to the Chinese ambassador in London, van der Zyl said that nobody could see the evidence and fail to note what she describes as “similarities between what is alleged to be happening in the People’s Republic of China today and what happened in Nazi Germany 75 years ago: People being forcibly loaded on to trains; beards of religious men being trimmed; women being sterilised; and the grim spectre of concentration camps.”

The region where Mulan was filmed – known to Uyghurs as East Turkestan – is a network of prison camps in which at least one million, perhaps up to three million, Uyghurs are incarcerated, subjected to appalling slave labour, sexual violence and torture.

Even beyond the camps, Xinjiang is like a scene from George Orwell’s novel 1984, home to the world’s most invasive and pervasive surveillance state that, through artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology, cameras on every corner and Chinese agents living with Uyghur families 24 hours a day monitors every Uyghur’s every move.

Religious freedom is stifled, slave labour is rife and a campaign of forced sterilisation is underway. On ITV last week a courageous doctor described conducting over 500 operations including forced abortions and forced removal of wombs.

The regime’s declared aim with regard to the Uyghurs, according to China’s state media, is to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins.” As the Washington Post put it in an editorial, “It’s hard to read that as anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent.” Leaked high-level Chinese government documents last year speak of “absolutely no mercy”.

The gravity of this crisis is illustrated by the fact that the man who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, announced last week he would lead an independent inquiry into whether the evidence amounts to genocide. Having already led a similar inquiry into allegations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China and concluded that this crime was being perpetrated and amounts to a “crime against humanity” under international law, his is a voice that should be listened to. The judgment in the China Tribunal that he led was that anyone interacting with the regime in Beijing should do so in the knowledge that they are “interacting with a criminal state.”

Disney, it seems is content to get into bed with this “criminal state”. As Mulan ends, the credits roll: eight government bodies in Xinjiang, including the public security bureau in Turpan, a city where several prison camps exist, and the CCP’s Xinjiang propaganda department are feted. This is a film produced in collusion with bodies that may yet be found to be accomplices to genocide.

As I played mahjong with my Hong Kong friends last weekend, two things happened.

First, we rolled the dice: 6 and 4. How could we forget? The June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – the CCP’s character in full view. Since then and until recently we thought, we hoped, we naively believed that the regime may have changed. It hasn’t.

Secondly, as I played mahjong, a young 12 year-old girl out shopping for art materials was jumped on by Hong Kong Police. Like the pregnant woman dragged to the ground the previous week, this girl posed no threat and did no wrong – yet the thugs in what still presents itself as Hong Kong’s police force saw her as a target. No wonder trust in the police has evaporated. One of many comments on my social media in response to my mahjong post said it all: “Hongkonger has no mood to play now. This is how a 12 year old girl arrested today.”

That’s the brutality that Mulan’s star, Liu Yifei, defends. Last year she tweeted her support of Hong Kong police, despite their widespread, disproportionate, indiscriminate brutality. Now we know where the film was made and with whose collusion, we know it is a sordid tale of collaboration with atrocity crimes.

If Mulan was a sincere celebration of Chinese culture, I’d go see it. But it isn’t. It is a CCP propaganda film, made by Disney.

I love China. Because I love China, I want the people of China – every one of them – to be free.

So don’t tell me – as I learn mahjong, practise my traditional characters, cook my stir-fry and chat with my Chinese friends – that I am a Sinophobe. Don’t you dare. If you’re truly for the people of China, join the #BoycottMulan campaign. Free Hong Kong and all of China.

Benedict Rogers is the Co-founder and Chair of Hong Kong Watch. The article was published in Apple Daily on 11 September 2020.