Blunt instrument? What a list of banned articles says about China's censors

FILE PHOTO - Customers use computers at an internet cafe in Taiyuan, Shanxi province August 13, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - An old review of an academic monograph on agrarian revolutionaries in 1930s China is hardly a political third rail in Beijing today, even by the increasingly sensitive standards of the ruling Communist Party.

That such a piece appeared on a list of some 300 scholarly works that Cambridge University Press (CUP) said last week the Chinese government had asked it to block from its website offers clues about the inner workings of China's vast and secretive censorship apparatus, say experts.