Chinese regulators crack down on time travel, 'bizarre' plots

No time travel for you! If you want to appear on Chinese television, at least.

In light of the continuing upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the Chinese government has been continuing to heighten its control over communications and media--to the point of dropping cell phone calls for quoted the wrong line of Shakespeare. Even so, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television's latest edict is a special kind of crazy.

According to CNN's Business 360 Blog, the agency issued new guidelines on March 31 discouraging plots line including "fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking."

The blog quotes CNN's Eunice Yoon, who said, "The government says … TV dramas shouldn’t have characters that travel back in time and rewrite history. They say this goes against Chinese heritage. They also say that myth, superstitions and reincarnation are all questionable.”

I usually try to keep the realms of politics and entertainment on separate spheres, but when politics invades the other, it's hard to ignore. The Chinese leaders behind this and other recent crackdowns are showing increased paranoia about their own positions even while their actions betray the power and control they wield.

The freedom of speech enjoyed in the United States is often taken for granted, especially when it comes to fiction. Many of the classics of Russian literature were banned in their home country after upsetting the Communist leaders while Shakespeare and his contemporaries had to be careful how far over the line they went when needling the royalty.

Of course there are many calls to ban books here in the U.S., from "Harry Potter" to "Tom Sawyer," and news of such blatant oppression as this latest Chinese crackdown shows just why we have to fight against any kind of censorship here.