news culture Netflix: A series sparks a territorial dispute between China and Vietnam. Censorship will strike again.
It is not uncommon for certain works to be censored or banned when approaching a country subject to a range of local customs (be it social, religious or otherwise). This time, it’s the question of territory that rocks a Netflix program.
Islands at the heart of the problem
While the Barbie film for a controversial map of the South China Sea has just been banned in Vietnam, a Netflix work is now suffering the same punishment. According to information collected by Bloomberg, Netflix, Inc. and FPT Telecom have removed Chinese romantic soap opera Flight to You from their catalogs in Vietnam. The reason ? Hanoi felt the artwork violated sovereignty laws as it showed a controversial map issued by the Vietnamese authorities. In fact, in several places in Flight to You we can see a map where the famous islands, where territorial tensions crystallize, do not belong to Vietnamese territory. To respond, FPT Telecom first blurred the map’s image, but the Vietnam Ministry of Culture’s Cinema Department felt that was not enough. For Vietnam, the 39-episode soap opera “Flight to You” has relevant content and is therefore being pushed out of the Netflix catalogue.
Hanoi is widespread
The ministry expressed this decision by noting that after analysis, it was confirmed that the program revealed a controversial map of the South China Sea islands. The government therefore gave interested parties 24 hours to act and remove Flight to You from the country’s catalogue. As Bloomberg reports, it is the second time in a week that the Southeast Asian country has made such decisions. In fact, after last year’s Uncharted, the Barbie film won’t be released in Vietnam due to a controversial map of the South China Sea. Currently, “Flight to You” is still available in Vietnamese on YouTube, but it’s likely that it won’t stay that way for long. For its part, a Netflix spokesman said that the program had been removed from the catalog in agreement with the country’s authorities, but that it was of course still available in other markets.
