A BANNED novel about the adulterous wife of a Chinese general and her trysts with a handsome young soldier has become the latest hit on the internet despite the best efforts of China’s censors to suppress it.

Propaganda officials have shut down a small literary magazine called Hua Cheng, or Flower City, which first published the story in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou.

The editors of Hua Cheng have been ordered not to speak to the foreign media and all copies of the book are supposed to have been confiscated.

However, a text of the story was placed on the internet and in the past few months it has been downloaded and circulated among thousands of readers.

The so-called “great firewall” of state cyber-policing has not stopped it. Selections were obtained and translated for The Sunday Times last week.

The erotic tone of the novel recalls classical Chinese pornography by coupling scenes of unbridled lust to a message of morality and satire. It has evidently touched a nerve among military and political leaders.

Meanwhile, the offending author has been hastily given a post in Beijing at a writers’ academy and has not been penalised for his literary achievement.

The Communist party’s ire has been increased by the mocking title of the short story: Serve the People. The slogan was coined by Mao Tse-tung in 1944 and remains a tenet of the party, painted on banners and carved in sweeping calligraphy upon public buildings.

In the hands of the author, Yan Lianke, 47, a former soldier himself, it acquires a double meaning. The words are engraved on a wooden board which sits on a table in the general’s house. When his wife desires satisfaction from the young soldier, who is attached to the general’s household as a gardener and cook, she places the board in a conspicuous place.

“Serve the people!” she commands, as the illicit lovers shed their clothes.

The general, who is never named, is clearly a divisional commander in a southern region of the People’s Liberation Army, say PLA veterans who have read the novel with relish.

The story is set in the 1970s and the general is frequently absent at conferences in Beijing to prepare China’s nuclear defences against atomic attack from the Soviet Union, which was seen at the time as a real threat. Yet although he wields the power of mass destruction, the novel slyly implies that the general is impotent.

He is corrupt in a minor way, too, detaching the young soldier, Wu Dawang, from his post in an elite infantry unit to bring him into the household. The perplexed young man soon discovers that his duties extend from the garden and kitchen to the bedroom whenever the general is away.

The wife, Liu Lian, loses all inhibitions in her lovemaking – an uncharacteristically femi-nist twist for Chinese erotica – and demands ever wilder adventures.

“Worn out, the lovers stayed naked for days at a time, wandering around the house,” the story runs. In the throes of passion, they smash a bust of Chairman Mao. The act of destruction sends them into ecstasy. Later they urinate over the chairman’s collected works.

Chinese connoisseurs will not have missed the allusions to the destructive frenzy of Mao’s Red Guards, who ran amok during the cultural revolution, the period in which the novel is set.

Oblivious to such metaphors, Chinese censors found the work appalling. It was “drenched in sex” and “slandered the PLA” according to an official complaint against Hua Cheng.

Even worse, from a political point of view, was its conclusion. Inevitably, the affair is exposed. But instead of being hustled off to a labour camp, Wu is proclaimed a model soldier, the PLA finds him a suitable wife and he is posted to a distant city.

The moral, to some readers at least, is that any principle may be compromised at the whim of the party elite.

The author’s popularity appears to have protected him against retribution – that and the fact that many serving PLA officers are said by veterans to have read the novel and found it hilarious.

“I believe that our leaders have been very generous to me,” Yan said guardedly in an interview with Hong Kong’s Phoenix Television. “I’ve come under no pressure. I didn’t mean to affect others like the people at Hua Cheng magazine. Any words from me can only cause more trouble for them.”

The editors of Hua Cheng have kept a low profile but one of them said that “official supervision of the press has been getting tighter and tighter”.

The internet has evidently created a new genre of “guerrilla literature” in China, whose authors, like Mao’s revolutionaries, can swim like fish in the sea of the people. But conventional publishing is still bound by state repression and punishment as books and magazines are easier to control.

It may come as no surprise to learn that Yan has, upon reflection, toned down the manuscript of his next novel, a story about the scandal of Chinese villagers who sold their blood for money and became infected by HIV, the virus that causes Aids.

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