Chinese celebrities have started to weigh in on the Hong Kong protests and some of the comments – like Jackie Chan‘s – haven’t gone down too well with the pro-democracy crowd.
The latest to chime in on the protests is our new real-life Mulan, Liu Yifei, who empowered the protesters to keep fighting for their freedom because that’s what Mulan would’ve done and *checks notes* oh wait, that’s not what happened at all.
Taking to her Weibo account, where she has around 66 million followers, the actress posted an image from China’s newspaper The People’s Daily (which is like China’s equivalent of Fox News and Sky News) that reads “I support the Hong Kong police; you can beat me up now” in Chinese and “What a shame for Hong Kong” below in English.
As a cherry on top, she also wrote “I also support the Hong Kong Police” with a heart and strong-arm emoji.
Yifei’s post has since been liked and shared thousands of times but it hasn’t gone down too well with the pro-democracy crowd, who have bombarded social media platforms with calls to boycott Mulan.
While Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are all blocked by China’s cooked censorship regime, folks have figured out workarounds to get their boycott message out and it’s perhaps no surprise to anyone that there are a lot of folks who aren’t happy with Yifei’s stance on the Hong Kong protests.
But pro-democracy folk urging people to boycott Mulan isn’t the only action that’s happening on the interwebs.
According to Variety, Beijing has been countering the Hong Kong protests by launching its own misinformation campaign at home and the aforementioned language shared by Yifei has been used as a pro-Beijing rallying cry that portrays protesters as violent agitators who were paid off.
If you take a peek at Yifei’s Instagram comments, you’ll find that it’s descended into a showdown between the pro-Beijing and pro-democracy crowds. Never mind taking down the Huns, the real battle is happening on social media.
How ironic that an actress playing a heroic symbol of freedom is so against the idea of democracy.
It’s all a complete fustercluck right now in Hong Kong and a conclusion to the protests looks further away than Mulan‘s March 25, 2020 release date.
We’ll just see how this whole #BoycottMulan thing pans out when the film comes out. Apropos of nothing, I hear Scarlett Johansson is free these days now that she’s done playing Black Widow and is looking for some new roles.