A new book about the Chinese Communist Party by a leading Australian journalist appears to have been banned in China, reported The Australian.

Although no definitive lists of forbidden tomes are published, readers in China are blocked when they go online in an attempt to buy The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, by Richard McGregor of the Financial Times.

In China, the websites of international booksellers such as Amazon respond: "This Page Cannot Be Displayed" -- just as sites do to requests for information, for instance, about events on June 4, 1989, or about the Dalai Lama.

This clearly indicates that the "net police" -- the tens of thousands of officials who scrutinise online content -- have determined that McGregor's book, although published in English and thus not intelligible to the great majority of Chinese readers, regard it as unacceptable.

McGregor, now based in London after working for 20 years in Asia, said, "By any objective measure, it is a massive over-reaction. A specialist book published overseas in English is no threat to China's powerful party-state.

"But the fact that they have bothered to block it shows not only how thorough the propaganda department can be when it wants to be, but also just how strangely sensitive the party remains to any form of scrutiny.

"At the end of the day, it is kind of perversely flattering, and very much confirmation of the secrecy that I was writing about."