All have been topics of hot public discourse in China in recent weeks, not in the pages of the official media but on the Internet.

From accounts of gruesome crimes and official corruption to bouts of Japan-bashing, the Internet is starting to set the news agenda. Propaganda czars who once controlled every word that appeared in print have been scrambling to react.

The trend is a threat to staid newspapers, such as the People's Daily, which for decades have shaped the news to suit the needs of the Chinese Communist Party and now deliver a product that almost nobody wants to buy.

Yet Charles Zhang, chief executive of Sohu.com, said he believed the government welcomed a degree of free speech on the Web as a way to gauge sentiment among educated Chinese.

"It's a kind of ventilation," Zhang said. "People say it electronically, and the government has a survey of what the people are really thinking."His site quickly erased content when prodded by officials,he added.

Click here to bash Japan
Some emotionally charged discussions have also shown a tendency to snowball into nationalistic movements.

Japanese computer maker Toshiba Corp is reeling from an angry campaign sparked last month by a Web site accusing the firm of discriminating against Chinese after it compensated only US consumers for a possible problem with its laptops.

Toshiba has insisted its computers are not flawed and said its settlement to provide US customers with coupons was a defensive move aimed at squashing the risk of a courtroom loss in Texas, a state with notoriously high jury awards.

But appeals to the Chinese public that none of its customers outside the United States received coupons fell on deaf ears.

In an example of the tail wagging the dog, rhetorical attacks on Toshiba jumped from the Web to official media. The firm is now facing boycotts and the likelihood of class action lawsuits.

Risk of political backfire
Yet incidents such as the Toshiba one have undoubtedly left the ruling Communist Party with an uncomfortable sense of what it would be like if public opinion turns against them.

In some instances it has.

In April, a small state-owned newspaper printed a sensational account of police torture in a remote village in the northern province of Shanxi.Li Lusong, 20, made repeated anti-corruption protests last December after local officials stalled plans to replace a dilapidated elementary school using publicly donated funds.

He was detained and beaten until one police officer, enraged by Li's repeated cursing and spitting, grabbed a blade, knocked him unconscious and sliced his tongue out, the report said.

Local police deny touching Li's tongue, and journalists who visited Li at a mental hospital failed to persuade him to show his tongue or find a doctor who could verify it was severed.

But Web surfers didn'T wait for verification to react. Thousands of comments poured into popular Web portals Sohu.com and Sina.com, which carried the article.

"Peasants of China rise up!" blurted one appalled reader.

Many predicted doom for the Communist Party unless it reformed itself and ushered in democratic elections.

Reuters