The commercial and critical failures of Disney’s Mulan - both in China and abroad – highlight the perils of playing both sides of widening political divides and the impossibility of appeasing the Communist Party of China.

Even before its mainland release – delayed due to COVID-19 and mostly limited to the Disney+ streaming service in the west –­ Mulan triggered a public relations disaster for Disney, which had already bent a well-known folk tale into an unrecognisable, Han-centric and CCP-friendly version of itself to make Mulan work on the mainland.

Alas, Disney’s efforts to please the CCP have backfired badly.

Mulan had already become a lightning rod for controversy when stars Liu Yi-Fei and Donnie Yen voiced support for the Hong Kong Police Force earlier this year. The predictable CCP bootlicking triggered a #BoycottMulan campaign from Hong Kongers on social media, but things have gone from bad to worse for Disney, and now the film is being criticised from all quarters for its cultural and ethical missteps.

The USD200m production that is spiraling to a spectacular worldwide flop after western critics slammed Disney for filming scenes in Xinjiang, where more than one million Uyghurs are being held in “re-education camps” amid reports of forced sterilisation and other atrocities in the region.

Who would have thought trying to get a feel-good folk story to jibe with the dystopian vision of Xi’s Chinese Dream would be so difficult? Turns out the problems are myriad when it comes to making a likeable film that suits an increasingly over-sensitive, insecure and hostile CCP, but one that doesn’t ignore human rights violations.

The list of groups Disney had tried to avoid offending in the making of Mulan is as long as the list of those it has upset – starting with both sides of the widening political divide in the west and ending with the perpetually outraged CCP.

The script had been reworked to change Mulan’s love interest from general Li Shang to a fellow soldier, to avoid falling foul of the #metoo movement. Upsetting the left is the least of Disney’s worries now: nobody likes Mulan. The west’s left and right are even in rare agreement that Mulan is on the nose ethically and even mainland Chinese hate it despite Disney’s best efforts. Now, it appears the CCP has put a final nail in Mulan’s commercial coffin.

Along with terrible reviews for the film from those who have watched pirated versions in China ahead of this week’s release, there is apparent central government edict to the media to not mention the film.

It isn’t anything in the film that has upset the CCP, it is the controversy itself. So, by Disney thanking the government for the privilege of filming in an area where a genocide is taking place, that has understandably upset those interested in human rights, but the attention on said genocide has upset the CCP.

It wasn’t as if Disney hadn’t jumped through the CCP censorship hoops previously to gain a green light in mainland cinemas. In 1997, as Hollywood attempted to join the western gold rush in what was quickly becoming the world’s biggest film market, Disney’s distribution of the hagiographic biopic of the Dalai Lama, Kundun, troubled the CCP, given the party’s many atrocities in Tibet, where it has killed an estimated 1.2 million people since forcibly occupying the region. Two years after Kundun, Disney’s attempt at reconciliation was an animated version of Mulan, which was a commercial flop in China and slammed by its critics there as overly westernised.

Disney doubled down with the live-action remake, hiring an army of advisors throughout the production process to ensure it pleased the Chinese people and CCP, thus gaining a mainland release. It isn’t surprising the film missed its mark artistically given it was clearly CCP propaganda lines that Disney feared crossing most.

A lot has changed since 2015, when production on Mulan began, and perhaps back then the changes to Mulan would have just been seen as more quirky examples of China’s soft power exerting influence on Hollywood films, like in 2013 when a scene in World War Z that mentions China as the origin of a devastating worldwide pandemic, ­as it is presciently in the novel, was cut to placate the CCP censors and gain a mainland cinema release.

The tragedy is that a big budget Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast and strong female lead was made, which is a rarity, only for Disney to align its values with a despicable regime.

Maybe Mulan’s failures are a sign for Disney, Hollywood and the west as a whole: it is time to wake up to the reality that when “weighing up interests” in the great Chinese cash grab, it is human rights and democratic values on one side of the scales and dollars on the other, and that under totalitarian rule, balance has become impossible.

(Michael Cox is a journalist and Hong Kong permanent resident currently based in Australia. He has previously written for the South China Morning Post, The Age (Melbourne) and Australian Associated Press. )

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play