A comment made in support of the Hong Kong Police Force more than a year ago by Chinese-American actress Liu Yifei was raked up all over again in September, around the time of the theater release of the live-action Disney film Mulan. Liu, who plays the eponymous female lead in the film, had posted a note endorsing the HKPF on her Weibo account in August 2019. It was a reaction to the physical assault on a journalist from the Chinese mainland by a group of anti-government protesters, who were staging a sit-in at the Hong Kong airport at the time. The reporter, who was kicked around and ultimately zip-tied, had offended the protesters by carrying a T-shirt with an I-love-HK-police slogan in his backpack.
Almost immediately after she posted, “I too love the Hong Kong police. You can beat me up now,” Liu was accused of trying to ingratiate herself with the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing, and a #BoycottMulan campaign started trending on the worldwide web.
Usually, there are no winners in a game of cancel culture, i.e., the call to reject all things directly or even tangentially linked to an individual — often a public figure — or an institution one does not agree with or is upset about.
Radio stations stopped playing Michael Jackson’s songs after the broadcast of Leaving Neverland, a documentary about his alleged sexual abuse of children — a crime for which the singer had already been tried and acquitted. The actress Scarlett Johansson was accused of cultural appropriation for saying she was ready to play characters across race, gender and sexual orientations (since when did an actor’s job become limited to impersonating only those who look and behave like herself?). J.K. Rowling, the novelist best known for her Harry Potter series, was labeled as transphobic after using the phrase “people who menstruate” to mean women, leading to a call to boycott anything written by her.
Rejecting a book, film or piece of music on account of its links to an “offending” personality is in fact depriving oneself of the chance to experience a work of art. It is censorship based on prejudice rather than reason and genuine societal concerns.
Even if we were to assume, for argument’s sake, that Liu was indeed defending a flawed HKPF, she is entitled to an opinion and a political stance of her own. A film is essentially the manifestation of a director’s vision and the product of the labor and creative inputs from a huge number of people. A call to summarily boycott a film because one doesn’t agree with a cast member’s personal politics goes against the democratic principles that the anti-government protesters in Hong Kong are supposedly fighting to uphold.
One of the reasons why we turn to art is because we want to see ourselves in it. Good art is expected to cater to a diversity of interests. There is no way of finding out whether a piece of art supports multiple perspectives and has something to offer to an audience representing a heterogeneous range of political and ideological positions unless one has actually seen it.
Delayed by months on account of the pandemic, Mulan had a lukewarm opening in Hong Kong theaters in the first week of September but seems to be enjoying a steady run in multiplexes across the city since then and is also available on the streaming platform Disney+. It was on top of the box-office chart in Seoul in the opening week, despite a strong and sustained boycott campaign there.
Perhaps social media does not have the power to ruin the prospects of an artist or artistic project in the long run after all. Hate speech directed at art from behind the cover of one’s Twitter handle only succeeds in bringing animus into the creative space, causing undeserved pain to a few people and trying to foster a spirit of intolerance that is antithetical to the basic tenets informing art.
The author is a Hong Kong-based journalist.
