Nearly all books axed by Communist Party censors in recent years - running the gamut from erotic novels to critical exposes of corruption and peasant suffering - have become hot properties.

Far from scaring of the public, media hype brought about by the bans has helped some of those books gain instant notoriety.

A novella about steamy sex in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has become the latest work to offend the guardians of socialist mores and as a result scale the lists of popular reading.

When censors ordered its removal from bookstands earlier this year, it was the timing of its appearance that proved most crucial in precipitating the ban.

Serve the People, written by award-winning Yan Lianke, premiered on China's literary scene just weeks before Beijing unveiled a new anti-secession law that threatened the use of military force against Taiwan should the island's leaders go too far in their quest for independence.

Assuming the mantle of China's military chairmanship last fall, President Hu Jintao set out a tough policy for dealing with Taiwan's "splittists,'' one in which the Chinese army is to play a major role. The PLA, he said, must "prepare for war, and have no fear of Taiwan's procrastination.''

But Serve the People, penned by a former colonel in the army, undermines the very core of Hu's mantra. It paints a debauched image of the PLA where the lofty communist goal of "serving the masses'' is carried out through sex and gaining military honors is achieved by performing sexual favours for the bored and lonely wife of an upper echelon commander.

"The timing of the publication was probably accidental but this was not the image of the army the Chinese Communist Party wanted people to read about,'' said one source with knowledge of the inner workings of the Central Propaganda Bureau, the powerful party body that oversees censorship.

The ban came on the eve of the ann-ual session of the National People's Congress in March, which approved the anti-secession law unanimously. All copies of the literary magazine Hua-cheng, or Flower City, that published the novella in its first issue of 2005 were withdrawn. Yet once word got out about the ban, the novella became a hit with Internet users who posted portions of it on blogs for others to download.

Huacheng, the magazine that took the daring move of publishing the story after numerous other publications rejected it, saw sales of its subsequent editions soar, perhaps because readers suddenly thought it a hot magazine.

The editors of the magazine, based in Guangzhou, declined to comment either on the novella or on its impact. Author Yan, a native of Henan province who now lives in Beijing, says: "It has become very difficult for me to talk about my work''.

The novella "slanders Mao Zedong, the army, and is overflowing with sex,'' the Central Propaganda Bureau said.

"Do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from or report on it,'' the bureau ordered.

But despite the crackdown, Internet chat-rooms and literary circles are abuzz with talk about the book and speculation that Serve the People will soon be published overseas.

The novella tells the story of a young peasant soldier, Wu Dawang, who is assigned as an orderly to the household of his division commander.

The general has a pretty and much younger wife, Liu Lian, who spends her days dressing up and chasing the orderly with demands for dishes that boost her complexion.

While the general never appears as a fully fleshed-out character in the book, numerous hints are dropped suggesting he is impotent - a subversive twist that the Beijing literati interpret as an allusion to the frailty of the Communist Party's power.

Not surprisingly, an illicit love affair takes place when the general is called to Beijing for one of his lengthy political sessions. The story is set during the late years of the Cultural Revolution - the country is preparing for a nuclear attack by the Soviets and the army is preparing to deal a devastating blow to Taiwan's nationalists.

But the obedient orderly and the general's wife are oblivious to the challenges of the day. A wooden sign in the kitchen reading: "Serve the People'' becomes a coded signal for Wu that his services are required in the bedroom.

"Take your clothes off! Serve the people!'' Liu Lian commands Wu when he shows up in her bedroom. The adulterers spend days and nights naked, making love and coming up with ever more "counter-revolutionary'' ways of arousing their passion.

When Wu accidentally smashes a plaster statue of chairman Mao Zedong, the incident feels so "serious and momentous'' that "it can be described as an anti-social and anti-political act.'' Watching the statue breaking into pieces, and its head "rolling like a table tennis ball'' across the room, Wu feels he has committed a revolutionary sacrilege. He is "frozen with horror.''

Yet it doesn't take long before the two lovers embark on a wilful destruction of communist icons, racing to outdo one another and "use the degree of sacrilege to show the measure of their love for each other.''

They enjoy sexual ecstasy after smashing plaster busts of the chairman, ripping up his photos and his Little Red Book of revolutionary quotations and urinating on his slogans.

"Did I consider beforehand whether juxtaposing Chairman Mao's photos with sex would lead to a ban?'' mused the writer in an interview published on EastSouthWestNorth, a Chinese blog, soon after the ban.

"When I write, I don't think about publishing issues until I have finished. Expressing emotions and anger is the driving force for my creativity.''

By combining sex and political satire the author is playing with two sensitive subjects routinely frowned upon by party censors, but observers say it is the writer's sharp barb at corruption and vice in the army that earned it the axe.

"The sex scenes are not graphic, it is more about where they take place and about the title of the book,'' suggested one literary critic.

"Serve the people,'' of course, is among the most famous of Mao Zedong's sayings, a phrase he coined in 1944 that became a party credo. The slogan, written in Mao's personal calligraphy, now adorns the red gate of Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing where party leaders live.

The book also refers to a painful restructuring of the army being spearheaded by the general, something akin to the PLA's current modernisation drive.

The general's division has been selected as a trial base for transforming the PLA into a slimmer but stronger military force. Yet intriguingly, when the general's unit is disbanded, the only officers and soldiers sent back to the countryside are those suspected of knowing about Liu Lian's adultery.

By contrast, her lover is accorded military honors and pronounced a model soldier. He and his peasant wife are to be transferred to a new posting in the city.

Defaming the book has done nothing but tantalise public curiosity. What is more, the ban on Serve the People has stoked fervent anticipation for Yan Lianke's new work, which is said to be about the plight of AIDS sufferers in his native Henan province. Should Yan's forthcoming book fall victim to the censors' stamp, the author, a respected mainland writer but largely unknown abroad, might quickly become a literary star with foreign publishers.

Five years ago, censors outlawed female writer Mian Mian's breakthrough novel Candy - a bawdy depiction of sex and drugs in Chinese cities - and it became a runaway success at home and abroad.

The same fate befell another member of the mainland's infamous "babe'' club of authors, Wei Hui, and her steamy novel Shanghai Baby.

For both Mian and Wei, a literary ban on the mainland became a shortcut to name recognition and big sales abroad.

Last year, during the anxious time before the annual session of Chinese Parliament, censors banned two bestsellers on sensitive topics. Chinese Peasants: A Study by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao won the 2004 Letter Ulysses Award for its study of rural hardship; The Past is Not Like Smoke by Zhang Yihuoone dealt with the purges of intellectuals during the Communist Party's anti-rightist campaigns of the 1950s.

Both books, however, can be bought on the street and continue to circulate in China via the Internet.