But in her online diary, she began writing explicitly about these encounters, or those of her friends, and on July 26 described her brief and apparently unsatisfying liaison outside a restaurant with a famous guitarist in a Guangzhou rock band. The entry was posted at a popular online discussion board, spread among China's "netizens" like wildfire and was quickly picked up in the gossipy newspapers that feed China's growing celebrity culture. Eventually, she was featured in China's edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. In Beijing, editors at Sina.com and Sohu.com also noticed. An estimated 68 million people surf the Internet in China, with annual growth rates approaching 30 percent. Internet users tend to be China's most affluent and better-educated citizens, and though government censors block certain Web sites, the amount of information available online is enormous. It is also a growing and fiercely competitive business. By early November, Sina.com had bought the serialization rights to Ms. Mu's book, a compilation of her magazine columns, poems and some diary entries. (The diary entries included in the book are not explicit, Ms. Mu said.) Beginning Nov. 11, Sina.com used its home page to promote the serialization, along with photographs and interviews with the author. The response was stunning. Sina.com normally attracts 20 million visitors a day. Company officials say that number immediately jumped to 30 million and stayed there for 10 days. She also became a hot topic of debate in different Internet chat rooms and discussion sites. Was she an amoral hussy peddling pornography? Or was she a liberated woman? "The most loathsome person in the world is not the woman who writes exotic words, but those sanctimonious men!" wrote one contributor to a discussion page. "I despise Mu Zimei!" one critic countered. Another added, "This kind of diary will only serve as an excuse for more people who want to live a wild sexual life." Sociologists weighed in, pro and con. A Sina.com poll of more than 30,000 people found respondents about equally split. For months, the government had remained a bystander. But on Nov. 16, the state-run Beijing Evening News strongly criticized Ms. Mu and accused Sina.com of wrongly promoting her to attract more visitors. "The blind pursuit after this kind of phenomenon," the newspaper stated, "will mislead people into thinking that the government authorities over news are turning blind to this." Sina.com quickly minimized, though did not remove, its promotion of Ms. Mu. "When we saw the Beijing Evening News, we realized we might have gone too far," said Chen Tong, Sina.com's editor in chief. "So we pulled back." Sohu.com's editors initially held worried meetings about Sina.com's popular serialization. But a day after the Beijing Evening News article, the Sohu.com editors, citing the need for Internet sites to maintain content standards, published their own criticism about Ms. Mu. Asked if the Sohu article was an attempt to undercut Sina's star attraction, Mr. Zeng responded, "It had nothing to do with Sina." Ms. 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?" [The government has other ideas, it seems. The decision to ban her book was reported in the state-run media on Friday, Ms. Mu confirmed the ban. Online booksellers, who had been swamped with purchase requests, said government officials ordered them not to sell the book, which had been scheduled to go on the market this week.] In an effort to defuse the controversy, Ms. Mu said she quit her columnist job in early November and voluntarily shut down her Web site. She said she had other offers and hoped to continue writing, assuming the government does not ban her writing altogether. She also said the controversy had cramped her social life: she has, she said, been celibate for two weeks