Pushing China's Limits On Web, if Not on Paper.

BEIJING -- When the novelist Murong Xuecun showed up at a ceremony here late last year to collect his first literary prize, he clutched a sheet of paper with some of the most incendiary words he had ever written. It was a meditation on the malaise brought on by censorship. ''Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder,'' he planned to say. ''This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]