Chinese State Media: Disney Casting Black Actress as Little Mermaid ‘Lazy and Irresponsible’

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Disney
Frances Martel

The Chinese state-run Global Times newspaper condemned Disney on Thursday for its “lazy and irresponsible” live-action remakes, calling the decision to cast black actress/pop singer Halle Bailey as the title character in The Little Mermaid a decision driven by “political correctness” that alienates Chinese viewers.

Under the Communist Party, China has an extensive record of racism in both public policy and entertainment. The use of offensive “blackface” paint is a not uncommon occurrence on state television, appearing twice in recent Lunar New Year variety programs. More recently, this month, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security — the agency responsible for the repression of dissidents and other “law enforcement” activity — published a video featuring Chinese actors in brown face paint on its social media page. The actors were attempting to appear Indian and mocking popular Indian music in a video allegedly about traffic safety.

Outside of China, the Communist Party has exported its racism through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), attracting Chinese businessmen and scammers to Africa. Among the various embarrassing incidents for Beijing in the past five years was the arrest and deportation of a Chinese businessman from Kenya for calling then-President Uhuru Kenyatta a “monkey” and the exposure of a Chinese “charity worker” in Malawi who tricked local children into making videos for social media in which they were taught to say racist things in Mandarin, such as “I am a black monster and I have a low IQ.”

The Little Mermaid remake is set to hit theaters in both China and the West on Friday. Reports early this week indicated that Chinese moviegoers had little interest in the film; entertainment commentator Luis Fernando reported that the movie made only $4,000 in pre-sale tickets for shows between May 25 and 28 throughout all of China.

The Global Times appeared to confirm the dismal pre-sales on Thursday and attributed the lack of enthusiasm in the country to the “leap in imagination” that Disney was requiring of Chinese audiences in casting a black lead actress.

“Current pre-sales plus pre-screenings is about 410,000 yuan ($58,193) in the Chinese mainland, and the screen rate for its debut has also dropped from 30 percent to 13 percent,” the state newspaper detailed. “Many Chinese netizens said that like ‘Snow White,’ the image of the mermaid princess in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales has long been deeply rooted in their hearts, and it takes a leap in imagination to accept the new cast.”

The Chinese propaganda outlet also claimed that a similar “backlash” to the casting had occurred in Japan, offering no evidence for the claim.

The Global Times then went on to condemn Disney for its “forced inclusion of minorities” in its live-action shows.

“The controversy surrounding Disney’s forced inclusion of minorities in classic films is not about racism, but its lazy and irresponsible storytelling strategy,” the Times asserted. “If the company truly wants to represent marginalized groups, why not create original stories that reflect their experiences instead of turning classic tales into ‘sacrificial lambs’ for political correctness?”

The newspaper then condemned Disney for turning fairy tales into “arenas for racial conflict” and depriving them of “romance and fantasy.”

The Global Times similarly expressed disappointment in 2019, when Disney announced the casting of Bailey as Ariel, the titular Little Mermaid.

“Unfortunately, it seems that Chinese audiences aren’t buying into the casting decision,” the state outlet declared at the time, describing Chinese viewers as “shocked.” “Although some Chinese netizens think Bailey is beautiful and sweet, they generally hold the opinion that the casting choice is a disruption of the character who originally appeared as a white princess with red hair in the Disney cartoon.”

Disney does not appear to have downplayed Bailey’s significance in the film as it has in the past for black actors. In one particularly controversial decision, designers for the Chinese promotional poster for Star Wars: The Force Awakens significantly minimized the image of John Boyega, the black actor who played major character Finn in the 2015 movie. Western audiences condemned the near-elimination of a main character from the poster, particularly compared to Boyega’s prominence in the Western version.

Boyega would go on to later condemn Disney’s treatment of his character in the film and its sequels.

“What I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are, and then have them pushed to the side,” Boyega said in an interview with GQ magazine in 2020. “Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver. You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all.”

The years of negative press for The Little Mermaid in Chinese state media follows enthusiastic efforts by Disney to court the Communist Party, most prominently through the production of the live-action remake of Mulan featuring pro-regime actress Liu Yifei and the cooperation of Chinese forces responsible for the ongoing genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic people in East Turkistan. Disney went as far as to thank local “Public Security” bureaus in occupied East Turkistan, where parts of Mulan were filmed, for their help in producing the film in its end credits.

Human rights activists and free governments have compiled mounds of evidence indicating that dictator Xi Jinping launched a genocide campaign in the region beginning at least in 2017, fueled by the imprisonment of as many as 3 million people in concentration camps. Survivors of the camps say they endured gang rape, indoctrination, extreme forms of torture, and slavery, among other crimes. Outside of the camps, the Chinese Communist Party forces an untold number of Uyghurs into slavery picking cotton or manufacturing for suppliers of multinational corporations.

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