Queering Time: Disjunctive Temporalities in Modern China

Responding to the popular 2011 television miniseries Palace (Gong 宫), about a contemporary woman who travels back in time and finds herself in a love triangle with two handsome Qing dynasty princes, China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) issued a now-famous directive noting that works like Palace “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.” The directive concludes ominously that these works “should no longer be encouraged.” The Western media almost immediately began reporting with amusement that China had banned time-travel works outright, though in reality the SARFT directive was addressing a more specific subgenre of time-travel works known as chuanyue (穿越; literally, “crossing over”), in which contemporary characters travel back to China’s dynastic past. Typically featuring plots that emphasize the protagonist’s romantic liaisons and pursuit of power and social recognition, chuanyue fiction has emerged as one of the Chinese Internet’s most popular literary genres. Tens of thousands of titles are already available, with many of the works running for hundreds or even thousands of pages. Around 2009 several Chinese television series based on these novels began to be released, and it was this new cultural phenomenon that the March 29, 2011 SARFT directive was addressing. Many observers saw the government’s critique of chuanyue adaptations as