BEIJING -- Rolling Stone magazine has launched its first China edition with a celebration of U.S. rebels -- and a cautiously sanitized portrait of their Chinese equivalents.

The former icon of U.S. counterculture journalism, now entering the global mainstream with 11 international editions, has softened its punches and muted its voices in a bid for Chinese respectability. The result is another victory for Beijing's strategy of demanding political compliance from Western investors.

The Chinese debut of Rolling Stone, launched this month with 125,000 copies, is a tale of two oddly different magazines. Much of the edition, translated from the U.S. version, is an homage to what it hails as "trouble makers and renegades" such as the filmmakers Michael Moore and George Clooney, the rock star Bono, the writer Hunter S. Thompson and the anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan.

But the articles on Chinese personalities, in contrast, are strangely silent on political issues. The magazine makes almost no mention of the widespread censorship and banning of many Chinese singers and writers.

"For me, I can't see how this magazine is any different from other fashion magazines that also write about singers and music," he said.

On the cover of Rolling Stone's first Chinese edition is the famed rocker Cui Jian, who has rarely been permitted to give any stadium concerts in China for most of the past 15 years.

The cover story does not mention that one of his songs was the unofficial anthem of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. And it does not mention that he has been banned from Chinese stadium stages, with only a few exceptions, since the early 1990s.

Another article in the inaugural Chinese edition is a profile of Mu Zimei, the controversial Internet blogger who wrote extensively about her sex life until her blog was shut down by the authorities.

At the front of the magazine is a grandiose statement of purpose. "We believe the changes that are happening in entertainment, culture and lifestyle of today's China, and especially the people who have caused those changes, are worth the attention and support from Rolling Stone that we once gave to John Lennon and Bob Dylan," it says.

One popular Chinese blogger, Wang Xiaofeng, commented that the Chinese edition of Rolling Stone "completely satisfies our branded-life philosophy." But he warned that it is a "high-risk occupation" to publish a music magazine in China. "There's not much in the way of real gossip or resources to dish out," he said.

Rolling Stone is just the latest of a growing number of Western magazines to publish a Chinese edition. There are now Chinese editions of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Popular Science, Esquire, Elle and many others. Magazine advertising in China is booming, with a spending increase of 23 per cent last year.

To publish a magazine in China, a foreign publisher must form a joint venture with a Chinese company and must win government approval. Technically, it must be published by a government-sponsored organization.

These requirements have forced many Western publications to soften their stories and censor themselves in an effort to win government approval to publish in China.

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