ANOTHER CHINESE BLOGGER has been banned, though this is a somewhat different case:

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 this week. She has quit her magazine columnist job and halted her blog, or online diary.

Yet at a time when “Sex and the City” episodes are among the most popular DVD’s 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.

I often hear that the Western belief in sex as some sort of liberating force is silly and superficial.

So why are tyrants always so afraid of it? (Thanks to Hylton Joliffe for pointing out this story, which I had missed).