A wave of online outrage has forced Chinese censors into an unprecedented decision to allow eight banned books to remain on the shelves.

The books, which touch on long-taboo historical and social issues, remained on sale yesterday, even in official bookstores despite an official ban, with penalties — including fines — imposed on the publishing houses, which have been told not to print more copies.

In an apparent attempt to quell public outrage officials chose to allow existing stocks of the books to sell out.

Demand has been high. At the respected All Sages bookshop in Beijing, Cang Sang, by Xiao Jian, which tells the tale of a man from the 1911 fall of the last emperor to the Great Leap Forward in 1958, sold out this week.

Publication on the internet of a second letter by the renowned author, Zhang Yihe, will only add to the authorities’ woes.

Officials at the General Administration of Press and Publication — effectively China’s office of censorship — were stunned when news of their unannounced ban provoked a furious response from bloggers. The censorship office and the way it introduced the ban secretly came in for criticism.

Zhang, who spent ten years in jail during the Cultural Revolution, addressed her letter to the current session of parliament, calling for an end to all forms of censorship. She urged the National People’s Congress to look into the prohibition of Performers’ Pasts, an apparently innocuous book on the lives of Peking opera singers, along with the seven other publications.

This is the third of Zhang’s three books to have been banned. She won fame in 2004 for a memoir about her father who embraced Mao Zedong’s revolution only to be purged in the 1957 AntiRightist Campaign, along with about 500,000 rightists or liberals. Her father and four others are the only rightists never to have been rehabilitated by the ruling Communist Party.

Zhang believes that her father’s history and her own treatment by the Chinese authorities are no coincidence.

In a rare interview the reclusive Zhang told The Times: “I am a low-key person. But after my first, second and third books were banned it was more than any person could endure. As a citizen I must stand up. I don’t care if I succeed or fail. “ It is unbearable to be put on such a list. They deny that the ban on my book is linked to my family background. In fact, that’s the very reason.”

The co-author of one of the other banned books, Zhu Ling, said that she had received no explanation for the ban. “I can’t rule out the possibility that the Government softened its line because of the internet response,” she said. Hu Fayun, who wrote This is how it goes@ SARS.com, a novel about a woman who fell in love with the internet at the cost of her relationship with a vice-mayor during the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, has few doubts about the power of the internet.

“The traditional ‘no-talk’ style of control by the Government has been broken by the internet. Different voices can be found there,” he said. Hu has never been notified of the ban. But then, he said, many policies are implemented in China without ever being announced.

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