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It was just another routine act of censorship in a country where the censors rule. But as they casually killed the articles, the Chinese censors were unaware that they were unleashing a monster.

From that simple act of censorship in 2002, the phenomenon of blogging was born in China. The censors forced their victim to create a new channel for free expression -- a channel now used by tens of millions of Chinese citizens.

The author of the banned articles, a young journalist named Fang Xingdong, was an outspoken critic of the software giant Microsoft. But two hours after his critical essays about the company were published on July 6, 2002, they suddenly disappeared from every website in the country, deemed too controversial.

"I had been one of the pioneers of the Internet in China," he recalls. "Yet after six years of being published on the Internet, suddenly I couldn't get on any websites."

Frustrated and angry, he talked to a friend who mentioned the emergence of blogging in the United States. He glanced at a few blogs. At first they seemed too primitive. But as he thought about it, he began to see the creative possibilities.

"I was very excited," he says. "I couldn't sleep all night."

Four years later, Mr. Fang is chairman and chief executive of China's biggest blogging empire. His company, Bokee, is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day.

Blogging has become the hottest media trend in China. And his company is so popular that it has attracted the interest of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch.

He laughs modestly when people call him the father of Chinese blogging. But it was Mr. Fang who coined the Chinese word for blogging and wrote a lengthy Declaration of Chinese Bloggers to popularize the concept. (He decided that blog should be translated as boke, which sounds similar to the English word but can also be translated as "plentiful guests" or "knowledgeable man.")

While blogging is the latest fashion among Chinese celebrities and writers today, it was a difficult struggle for Mr. Fang to promote the concept in its early days. "I spent a lot of time explaining blogs in 2002 and 2003, and now people finally see that I was right," he says.

"Blogs have changed the way information is spread in China. In the past, it was always the editors who chose what was on the Internet. But blogging has allowed people from behind the curtain to stand in front of the curtain. It's had a revolutionary effect, from the bottom up."

Mr. Fang, 37, is a farmer's son who studied electrical engineering and later became a journalist and IT analyst. Until he went to university, he still helped with the annual seeding and harvesting on the family farm. He calls himself a "common man" who was never a top student. His plain office, devoid of luxuries, reveals that he still has the frugality of a peasant. "Because of my life experiences, I feel close to the grassroots," he says.

In the early years of blogging, one of his biggest obstacles was the hostility of China's Communist rulers, who had an instinctive suspicion of anything that might put even a small piece of power in the hands of the masses. It took a long series of meetings from 2002 to 2004, but he eventually won the argument by appealing to officials' patriotism.

"We did a lot of work to persuade them. They thought blogging was too messy -- everyone would have the right to publish on the Net. They took an ideological stand. But we said this was an international trend. If people weren't allowed to blog in China, they would go to foreign sites. We're very proud that today it is domestic companies who are the main blog sites in China, not foreign sites."

Of course, the authorities did not allow a completely wide-open system. Censorship is still practised, even at Mr. Fang's company. Among his 80 employees are 10 people who comb through the blogs every day, deleting anything deemed to be obscene or politically unacceptable.

He hopes that the Chinese blogosphere will become self-regulating. "If it's more orderly, there will be less pressure on us," he says. "I think a blog should have a basic foundation of morality and law. I compare it to a person's home."

He rejects complaints from people who say he has sold out. He points out that he was one of the first to criticize a recent proposed regulation that would force bloggers to register with real names.

"I had to change my role from being a critic to being an administrator, but I haven't lost my independence," he says. "I still criticize some of the most powerful companies."

His company, which attracted a $10-million investment from venture capitalists last year, is not yet profitable. But he expects it to break even within six months. After that, he hopes to become competitive with the biggest websites in China, which would make his one of the most popular in the world.

Even as he gives an interview, Mr. Fang is unable to stop his fingers from straying to his laptop keyboard to tap out the latest entry in one of the three blogs that he still maintains. He estimates that he spends 10 hours a day on the Internet.

One of his blogs is a review of movies that he watches. "My only hobby now is watching DVDs," he says. "In the past, I liked to read books, but I don't have time for that any more."

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Another Web tycoon

At 31, Tom Anderson is six years younger than Fang Xingdong, but has already built and sold his Internet company.

After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a master's degree in film studies, Mr. Anderson and a friend, Chris DeWolf, launched the social networking site MySpace.com in early 2003.

The site became so successful that it now hosts 80 per cent of all social-networking traffic and has more than 100 million individual accounts. In July, 2005, the site was sold for $580-million (U.S.) to News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, who has also discussed investing in Mr. Fang's Bokee.