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."
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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.
Coronavirus victim
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.