I ljuset av kinesisk censur finns det fortfarande betydande doktor som fandom bakom den stora brandväggen?

Den här raden i Den kinesiska strömmen" The Economist - 9 november 2013 tycks innebära att Kina har en regel som spärrar bilder av tidsresor.

Rules about content range from the predictable (no shows inciting political unrest) to the puzzling (no depictions of time travel). It takes months for programmes to get official approval for broadcasting, and only an estimated 30% of shows that are made get aired on TV.

Detta verkar bekräftas av The Guardian som även anger resonemanget:

Sci-fi encourages us to imagine alternative realities – so if China is none too keen on the Doctor and his ilk, don't be surprised ... Time travel television, said China's government administrator of radio and television, is "frivolous" in its approach to history – a verbal warning that was seen as tantamount to an official ban. ...

The Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson once pointed out that science fiction and historical imagination are actually aspects of the same thinking. He believed that the effect of immersing yourself in another historical age in, say, The Eagle of the Ninth, was very similar to travelling in your mind to the world of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. Both genres are set apart from pure fantasy, because they claim some basis in reality. Sci-fi expounds futures that might be possible, or at least that follow basic rules of human nature in how they portray people; historical fiction is, likewise, rooted in actual events.

So China is right to fear time travel. No state that wants to keep governing forever can afford to let people imagine alternatives. Perhaps this is the true reason for Doctor Who's popularity in Britain. When it screens, millions of people defy the rule of reality and escape together into worlds of possibility, worlds of otherness, dreams of utopia.

Med ett sådant välkänt program skulle jag bli förvånad om det inte fanns någon form av underjordisk handel med uppspelningsvideo eller något liknande - men huvudfrågan kollar ner till det här:

Är doktor Vem en populär show där? Finns det någon form av underjordisk gemenskap, eller hämmar denna till synes bizaare-begränsning fandom där?