For the past month, as China's propaganda machine has promoted the nation's new space hero or the latest pronouncements from Communist Party leaders, the Chinese public has seemed more interested in a 25-year-old sex columnist whose beat is her own bedroom.
"I think my private life is very interesting," said the columnist, Mu Zimei, arching an eyebrow and tapping a Marlboro Light into an ashtray. She added: "I do not oppose love, but I oppose loyalty. If love has to be based on loyalty, I will not choose love."
Mu Zimei is both reviled and admired, but she is not ignored. The country's most popular Internet site, Sina.com, credits her with attracting 10 million daily visitors. Another site, Sohu.com, says Mu Zimei is the name most often typed into its Internet search engine, surpassing one occasional runner-up, Mao Zedong.
Her celebrity -- which exploded when she posted an explicit online account of her tryst with a Chinese rock star -- first seemed to baffle government censors but now has drawn a familiar response. Her forthcoming book was banned last week. She has quit her magazine columnist job and halted her blog, or online diary.
Yet at a time when Sex in the City episodes are among the most popular DVDs in China, the Mu Zimei phenomenon is another example of the government's struggle to keep a grip on social change in China. Her writings have prompted a raging debate about sex and women on the Internet, where more people are writing blogs or arguing anonymously about a host of subjects in chat rooms and discussion pages.
"She does bring a huge impact on Chinese society," said Zeng Fuhu, a top editor at Sohu.com.
Such sweeping talk does not impress Mu as she sits in a bistro in this south China boomtown. Women at a nearby table try to eavesdrop as China's scarlet-lettered woman estimates that she has slept with about 70 men, and counting.
She said she never realized her online diary would be so widely noticed, or that it would grow into a national controversy. But she defended her right to sleep with as many men as she pleased -- and to write about it.
"If a man does this," she said, "it's no big deal. But as a woman doing so, I draw lots of criticism."
Sex, and government anxiety about it, is not a new issue in China. In January 1994, the government banned The Abandoned Capital, a sexually explicitly, best-selling novel by an acclaimed author, Jia Pingwa. Then in May 2000, censors banned another sex-soaked best seller, Shanghai Baby, by Zhou Wenhui.
But Mu's case is notable because her most controversial work appeared on the Internet. Mu Zimei is the pen name of Li Li, who began working in 2001 as a feature writer at City Pictorial, a glossy magazine covering fashion and social trends. At the end of 2002, editors overhauled the magazine and decided they wanted a sex columnist who could write about "real life" issues.
Mu said she was chosen because editors knew she was familiar with the subject. Her first sexual experience -- on April 30, 1999, she noted -- ended with an abortion and left her weary of the opposite sex. She followed that with a "pretty normal boyfriend" before concluding she was not a one-man woman. "Personally, I felt I was suitable for temporary relationships," she said.
Her biweekly column in City Pictorial began in January. Her topics included recommendations on the best music for good lovemaking, the aphrodisiacal benefits of eating oysters and technical pointers on making love in a car.
Though not without precedent, it was racy subject matter for China and the attention it got eventually provoked a criticism in the Beijing Evening News. That and the ban of her book led Mu to voluntarily halt her column and her blog to defuse the controversy.
Mu does not regard herself as peddling smut. She said her generation of Chinese grew up with little or no sex education. "Some learned it from videos," she said. "Why not from words?"
She also said the controversy had cramped her social life: she has, she said, been celibate for two weeks.
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