Why Do Many Asian Communities Want to #BoycottMulan?
Disney’s live-action “Mulan” remake hit Disney Plus over the weekend, igniting controversies new and old.
According to the data-trends company SEMrush, Google searches for “Boycott Mulan” increased 1,900% from the movie’s release date, September 4, to September 5. There were 19,236 tweets using the hashtag “#BoycottMulan” on Twitter from September 1 to September 9.
43.73% of tweets about “Mulan” in that time frame expressed negative sentiment, according to SEMrush. 40.39% were positive and 15.88% were neutral. The company uses machine learning models to identify whether a tweet is positive, negative, or neutral in tone. For a tweet to be negative, it had to contain a word or phrase considered negative by the model, such as “terrible,” “disaster,” or in this case, “boycott Mulan.”
Calls to boycott the movie were reignited ahead of its release last week because its star, Liu Yifei, had shared a post to Chinese social network Weibo last August in support of Hong Kong police during the city’s pro-democracy protests. At the time, “#BoycottMulan” was trending on Twitter.
A new controversy erupted after the movie’s release, as the end credits thanked government entities in China’s Xinjiang region that had been implicated in human-rights violations against Muslim Uighurs. Parts of the movie were filmed in the region.