I’m grateful to our former intern Natalie Jacoby for retweeting Popular Science’s tweet of a headline that, I assumed on first reading, was an Onion-style joke:
China blocks all movies about time travel, saying it “disrespects history.”
But a glance at the enclosed link, to a blog post at the Web site ChinaHush, makes clear that the Chinese government’s move is quite serious. According to the journalist (who goes by the name of Olivia), time-travel dramas have become very popular on Chinese television:
Usually the protagonist is from the modern time and for some reasons and via some means, travels through time and all the way back to the ancient China where he/she will constantly experience the “culture shock” but gradually get used to it and eventually develop a romance in that era. Though obviously the Chinese audience is fond of this genre of shows, the country’s authority … is not happy about this trend and calls a halt to the making of this type of of drama.
China is the biggest holder of American foreign debt, not to mention our biggest trade partner. And just think, there's lots of influential people here in the USA that say we should become more like China. You cannot make this kind of stuff up. To read the rest of the article, click here.