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CHINESE officialdom is struggling to respond to waves of satire on the internet, regularly used by 123 million people.

These net users are flexing a newfound freedom to communicate their emotions - and fears, desires, ambitions and humour - to a broad audience. It is the sort of freedom never before experienced in China.

A typical case is that of Qin Zhongfei, an education clerk in the small town of Pengshui, in the vast, mountainous Sichuan province in central southern China.

He wrote a poem about corruption in the town, illustrated by the fate of a planned school that was never built, although $350,000 was spent on it. It says in part:

Look at Pengshui today, full of malaria,
Cadres and people trapped in conflict,
The police even insulting corpses.
The moon is dark and the wind is high.
Officials are masters at grabbing money and catching people.
White Cloud middle school has become
A castle in the air.

He distributed his poem to friends and relatives by email and mobile phone text messages.

A fortnight later Mr Qin, previously an exemplary citizen, was hauled from his home in handcuffs by police who also removed all the books in his rented home.

He was charged with libel, even though he used alternative names for those at whom he pointed his satirical finger.

A line in the poem reads, "The horse is running away" - a reference to Ma Ping, the former Pengshui Communist Party secretary and thus town boss, detained for corruption six weeks ago. Ma is also the Chinese character for horse.

The police detained more than 100 people who had received the poem, and insisted they recite it.

If they failed, they were marked down in the official record as disobedient.

Colleagues to whom Mr Qin sent his poem were told they would never be promoted.

When he was jailed for "a severe criminal act" - leaving his wife, five-year-old son and crippled mother with no income - a blogger in the nearby city of Chongqing, Li Xingchen, took up his cause, reviling the "modern literary prison" that is Pengshui.

This led people all over the country to bombard the Pengshui police with messages citing Mr Qin's poem.

The case began to receive coverage in city newspapers, and when Mr Qin's appeal was eventually heard, it was upheld - a rare event - and the court ordered him to be given the standard compensation for wrongful imprisonment, which totalled 2525 yuan ($420), more than three months' wages, for the 29 days he served.

However, even in Chongqing, with a population of 12 million, officials are trying to suppress online satire.

They are not only attempting - almost certainly in vain - to force all internet users to register with the authorities, but are introducing rules to fine individual web users almost $1000 a time for "online defamation".

The most popular form of online satire is e-gao - "do your own thing with other people's work". The exemplar is Hu Ge, a young sound engineer in Shanghai, who soared to fame when his 20-minute parody of filmmaker Chen Kaige's big-budget epic The Promise got so much under the famous director's skin that he threatened legal action.

A follow-up spoof of TV ads, appropriating clips from Hollywood films including Mr & Mrs Smith and Terminator 2, was viewed by more than 120,000 people in its first week of posting.

Zhang Dongming, research director of internet consultancy BDA China, says young Chinese consumers are not especially concerned with politics, but are eager to participate in internet sites that give them the opportunity to express their thoughts about how they spend their spare time.

She says other popular sites are those that allow diners to post restaurant reviews and one that records amateur singers' efforts and ranks them according to users' responses.