I’m grateful to our former multimedia producer 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 drama.

She writes that the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television announced that “the producers and writers are treating the serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore.”

Let’s put aside the fact that “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Alain Resnais’s “Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime,” and Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” disprove the notion that the depiction of time travel is inherently frivolous—let’s look adoringly at frivolity itself. What the Chinese time-travel plots, as described above, have in common is the notion of escape: leaving contemporary, Communist-dominated China for the China of another era, one where, despite mores that are, in some ways, odd and outdated, love and happiness can be found. Time travel serves here as a dream of freedom from present-day strictures—or simply as a cry for freedom, from precisely this kind of idiotic and despotic regulation. As I suggested, today and earlier this week, regarding “Meek’s Cutoff,” the narrow representation of material history serves a programmatic view of political art. The free play of imagination—the liberation of the inner life—is itself a higher stage of politics.