Regional tensions over the South China Sea have tanked the sales of a popular children’s doll in Vietnam after it was put under investigation and accused of being unpatriotic because a design marking appeared to resemble China’s “nine-dash line”.

The Baby Three doll is Chinese-made and had reportedly been hugely popular among children and Gen Z in Vietnam earlier this year. Between September, when it first gained popularity, and December the dolls reportedly generated US$1.6m in sales.

However a suggestion that a heart-shaped design on one version of the doll looked like the controversial line that China’s government inserts on world maps to make a territorial claim over most the South China Sea sparked online backlash. An international tribunal in The Hague has ruled China’s territorial claim invalid and it is disputed by countries including Vietnam. Beijing has rejected the ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

In response to online outcry, Vietnam’s industry and trade ministry ordered an inspection of toys supposedly displaying the line, warned they were “affecting national security and territorial sovereignty”.

Retailers have slowed or stopped sales. According to data cited by state media from YouNet ECI, an e-commerce data analysis platform, the average price of Baby Three on Shopee and TikTok Shop halved in the first 10 weeks of 2025.

“Almost all children started to boycott [the dolls] because they saw it as a nationalistic issue, thinking that buying Baby Three was unpatriotic,” one vendor told AFP.

Ngoc Hang, a retailer in Ho Chi Minh City, told VN Express that her revenues had dropped by half after the government announced the inspections and penalties.

“Consumers have called for boycotts, and I had to lower prices by 30-50% to liquidate my stocks.”

In early March the eyewear retailer Anna Eyewear announced it was terminating a branding collaboration with Baby Three over “controversial character drawings”. It said that as a Vietnamese company, it wanted to “bring our customers not only quality products but also good cultural and humanitarian values”.

At the same time, a popular e-commerce streamer, Đặng Tiến Hoàng, announced he would stop selling the dolls.

“Although the income is good for us, the land and country must be the top priority,” he said, sparking a storm of debate in the comments.

Vietnamese authorities take a particularly hard line on depictions of the nine-dash line on products or in pop culture. In 2023 the Barbie film was banned from cinemas over a scene in which a crudely drawn toy map appeared to include the line. The same year Netflix was ordered to remove a Chinese series that regularly featured the map. In 2022 the film Uncharted, starring Tom Holland, Mark Walhberg and Antonio Banderas, was banned for featuring the map.