2023-08-13 01:30:06
The trailer for the film “Barbie” broadcast on a giant screen outside a shopping mall in Beijing on July 20, 2023. GREG BAKER / AFP
With 236 million yuan (about 30 million euros) in revenue, Barbie is a modest commercial success in China. But the impact of Greta Gerwig’s film, which has just exceeded a billion dollars in sales worldwide, goes far beyond: since its release at the end of July, it has fueled an intense conversation on the place of women in Chinese society.
“It’s a commercial, entertaining and, at the same time, feminist film. It’s a first, and it’s very convincing.”, Judge Zhang Zhou, 29, who works in marketing in Shanghai. She is not the only one to think so: the enthusiastic reviews of the public convinced the Chinese cinemas, which had reserved little space for her on her release, to multiply by four the number of screenings the first two weeks of exploitation, doing Barbie the fifth most viewed film of the moment, behind Mission : Impossible Dead Reckoning partie 1 and other Chinese productions, but ahead Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
“I rushed to see it because I was afraid it would be censored! I had heard that in South Korea, for example, men had been very offended. I knew the same thing was likely to happen in China”, comments Wang Yuqian, 27, a graduate in journalism, living in Zhengzhou, in Henan (central-eastern China). But the film’s satirical approach, set in both a female-dominated fantasy world of Barbie and California — Barbie’s opportunity to experience patriarchy — seems to have convinced censors that it was harmless.
The Hollywood production had also taken care to embrace the Chinese vision of geopolitics by drawing on a map that was not very detailed “the line of nine points”, which represents Beijing’s claim to most of the South China Sea. This choice led to the banning of the film in Vietnam, which claims part of these territories.
Several cases of harassment or rape
However, Wang Yuqian’s concern was well-founded: in recent years, while feminist ideas have been developing among the younger generations, the movement itself is progressing with difficulty. Hostile to any form of social mobilization, the Chinese authorities did not hesitate to imprison activists who campaigned for women’s rights.
If, in the wake of the #metoo movement, several cases of harassment or rape have emerged, few have led to convictions, and discussions on the subject are regularly censored, leaving only innocuous comments.
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