Disney Under Fire for Filming "Mulan" Scenes in Xinjiang

Rights groups, academics, and journalists have exposed a harsh crackdown against Uighur and Kazakh Muslims in Xinjiang, including mass internments, enforced sterilizations, forced labor as well as intense religious and movement restrictions.

Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society, said the film was now "arguably Disney's most problematic movie" since "Song of the South" — a 1946 glorification of antebellum plantation life that the company has since pulled.

"It's sufficiently astonishing that it bears repeating," he wrote in a Washington Post column.

"Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a public security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is the site of one of the world's worst human rights abuses happening today."

Read also: US Imposes Trade Sanctions on Chinese Companies as Muslim Abuse Complaints Heat Up

Badiucao, a dissident Chinese artist living in Melbourne, said he was currently working on a new cartoon portraying Mulan as a guard at one of the internment camps in Xinjiang to satirize Disney's new film.

"It's very problematic and there's no excuse. I mean, it's clear, we have all the evidence showing what is going on in Xinjiang," he told AFP.

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Baduicao accused Disney of "double standards", embracing western social justice movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter, while turning a blind eye to China's rights abuses.

The live-action remake of Disney's 1998 animation classic, "Mulan" has had a troubled release.