Congress members already have asked Attorney General Bill Barr to prosecute Netflix for “child pornography” for its movie “Cuties.” Now lawmakers are concerned about the streaming site’s “partnership” with a foreigner described as a “Chinese genocide denier.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported Republican senators are demanding Netflix explain its decision to adapt a Chinese science fiction trilogy written by a Xinjiang genocide denier into an original series.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., are among the senators spotlighting the effort to turn Chinese author Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Problem” trilogy into a live-action series.
Liu defended his government’s brutal oppression of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group, in an interview with the New Yorker.
The Congress members said the Chinese Communist Party “is committing atrocities” in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
“Sadly, a number of U.S. companies continue to either actively or tacitly allow the normalization of … these crimes,” they said. “The decision to produce an adaptation of Mr. Liu’s work can be viewed as such normalization.”
The Beacon reported Netflix’s “collaboration with Liu reflects Hollywood’s willingness to cater to the massive Chinese market, even if it means turning a blind eye to the country’s human rights abuses.”
“Disney’s recent live-action remake of Mulan even thanked Xinjiang authorities – some of them directly implicated in the Uighur crackdown – in its closing credit. Hollywood studios also routinely avoid topics that might anger Chinese censors, going so far as to change movie villains’ nationalities from Chinese to North Korean,” the Free Beacon said.
It was in a 2019 interview that Liu defended his nation’s one-child forced-abortion practices, its authoritarian government, and its restrictions on Uyghurs.
The Uyghurs, he said, “posed a terrorist threat.”
And his government, he alleged, was “trying to lift them out of poverty.”
Netflix has listed Lui as a “consulting producer” for its proposed series.
“The senators wrote that the partnership made Netflix complicit in the ongoing repression of the Uighurs and asked the company if it knew of Liu’s pro-China comments. They did not go as far as to call for the outright cancellation of the adaptation but asked whether the company will ‘cast a critical eye’ on the project,” the Beacon said.
The letter warned: “While Congress seriously considers the systemic crimes carried out against the Uighurs, we have significant concerns with Netflix’s decision to do business with an individual who is parroting dangerous CCP propaganda,” the letter read. “In the face of such atrocities … there no longer exist corporate decisions of complacency, only complicity.”
The plans for the series came about when Bela Bajaria, a Joe Biden campaign megadonor, was in charge of international content for Netflix.
The Free Beacon said Bajaria and her husband Doug Prochilo cohosted a Biden fundraiser seeking donations from the Hollywood elite headlined by vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, D., Calif., in September.
Prochilo, also a prolific Biden donor, deleted his Twitter account after the Free Beacon reported he tweeted denigrating comments about Republican women.
At one point he insulted first lady Melania Trump, saying, “Pipe down, you illegal immigrant criminal.”
The “Cuties” movie by Netflix has been widely criticized for its blatant sexualization of young girls.
“The First Amendment protects corporations and individuals from obscenity law if they can prove artistic expression, but this protection rightfully does not apply to child pornography,” the letter by Reps. Doug Collins, R-Ga., Jim Banks, R-Ind., and 32 of colleagues said.
“‘Cuties’ is child pornography and its distributors should be prosecuted accordingly.”
Federal law defines child pornography as “any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor, and that conduct does not need to specifically depict sexual activity to qualify.”
The letter said the movie meets that definition in several scenes.
It includes a scene in which an 11-year-old girl dressed in a tank top and panties is splashed with water and begins twerking. It also displays an 11-year-old child’s bare breast.
