Regional tensions over the South China Sea have tanked the gross sales of a well-liked youngsters’s doll in Vietnam after it was put underneath investigation and accused of being unpatriotic as a result of a design marking appeared to resemble China’s “nine-dash line”.
The Child Three doll is Chinese language-made and had reportedly been vastly fashionable amongst youngsters and Gen Z in Vietnam earlier this 12 months. Between September, when it first gained recognition, and December the dolls reportedly generated US$1.6m in gross sales.
Nevertheless a suggestion {that a} heart-shaped design on one model of the doll seemed just like the controversial line that China’s authorities inserts on world maps to make a territorial declare over most the South China Sea sparked on-line backlash. A world tribunal in The Hague has dominated China’s territorial declare invalid and it’s disputed by international locations together with Vietnam. Beijing has rejected the ruling by the Everlasting Courtroom of Arbitration.
In response to on-line outcry, Vietnam’s business and commerce ministry ordered an inspection of toys supposedly displaying the road, warned they had been “affecting nationwide safety and territorial sovereignty”.
Retailers have slowed or stopped gross sales. In response to information cited by state media from YouNet ECI, an e-commerce information evaluation platform, the typical value of Child Three on Shopee and TikTok Store halved within the first 10 weeks of 2025.
“Nearly all youngsters began to boycott [the dolls] as a result of they noticed it as a nationalistic situation, pondering that purchasing Child Three was unpatriotic,” one vendor informed AFP.
Ngoc Grasp, a retailer in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, informed VN Specific that her revenues had dropped by half after the federal government introduced the inspections and penalties.
“Shoppers have referred to as for boycotts, and I needed to decrease costs by 30-50% to liquidate my shares.”
In early March the eyewear retailer Anna Eyewear introduced it was terminating a branding collaboration with Child Three over “controversial character drawings”. It mentioned that as a Vietnamese firm, it wished to “convey our clients not solely high quality merchandise but additionally good cultural and humanitarian values”.
On the identical time, a well-liked e-commerce streamer, Đặng Tiến Hoàng, introduced he would cease promoting the dolls.
“Though the earnings is nice for us, the land and nation should be the highest precedence,” he mentioned, sparking a storm of debate within the feedback.
Vietnamese authorities take a very arduous line on depictions of the nine-dash line on merchandise or in popular culture. In 2023 the Barbie movie was banned from cinemas over a scene by which a crudely drawn toy map appeared to incorporate the road. The identical 12 months Netflix was ordered to take away a Chinese language collection that recurrently featured the map. In 2022 the movie Uncharted, starring Tom Holland, Mark Walhberg and Antonio Banderas, was banned for that includes the map.
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