Why is Harrison Ford banned from visiting China?
The biggest movie stars spent a great deal of time travelling the world to either shoot or promote their latest projects. However, Harrison Ford hasn’t been welcome in China for going on 30 years.
Many of his on-camera efforts have been screened in cinemas nationwide, with The Force Awakens netting over $100million from Chinese screens alone. Still, the actor himself has been barred from entering the country’s borders since the mid-1990s.
As tends to be the case with a lot of high-profile public figures being banned from China, it was all caused by outspoken views that were deemed unpalatable under the political climate. Ford was married to his second wife Melissa Mathison from 1983 until 2000, and the screenwriter and producer was one of Hollywood’s most vocal supporters of the Tibetan independence movement.
In fact, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun was born from Mathison meeting with the Dalai Lama and asking if she could write a feature film based on his life. Becoming close over the course of their many meetings that greatly informed her screenplay, it was Mathison who suggested Scorsese for the director’s chair, with the legendary director getting banned from China as a result, too.
Ford also met the Dalai Lama through Mathison and even testified in front of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1995. He spoke passionately of the need for Tibetan independence, all while highlighting the human rights issues emerging from Chinese territories.
It’s a cause that the Star Wars and Indiana Jones icon has remained dedicated to ever since, and he even narrated the 2007 documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance to further outline his support. Kundun isn’t often held up as one of Scorsese’s greatest works, but it did have the unusual effect of being partially buried by its home studio in order to minimise any potential damage while leading to several bans.
Thanks to its investment in the burgeoning market, Disney had developed a working relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, leading then-CEO Michael Eisner to meet with local officials to try and stem the backlash. As noted by NPR, a transcript from the meeting found Eisner saying that while “the bad news is that the movie was released, the good news is that nobody saw it”.
Essentially, Disney actively sabotaged and limited Kundun‘s release so as not to anger the Chinese government, while their mere involvement saw Scorsese and Mathison banned from visiting the country. As the latter’s husband and somebody who’d also adopted her stance on Tibetan independence, Ford ended up joining them as one of just several figures with ties to the production that ruffled feathers to such an extent they were expressly forbidden from setting foot on Chinese soil from that moment on.
