It was a proud logo that the Beijing News team put on their masthead when they launched the feisty tabloid two years ago. But it seems that even this small symbolic statement was too much for the omnipresent censors-in-chief in the Communist Party's propaganda department - or the Publicity Department, as it likes to call itself.
The logo is round, in reference to both eyeballs and the globe, indicating the paper watches events from a global perspective. On it a flame burns on the Great Wall, harking back to ancient times when sentries used torches to warn of approaching invaders.
Beneath the image ran six tiny Chinese characters that said: 'Responsible to report everything.' They sat on the masthead for almost two years and bothered no one, but all of a sudden the publicity department apparently considered them to be fighting words.
Just a few days before the paper celebrated its second anniversary last week, the department ordered the slogan stripped from the logo, according to sources at the paper. The imagery still runs on the masthead, but without the accompanying text it looks odd, like a crooked painting hanging on a wall.
I wanted to ask the Publicity Department why such an innocuous phrase would be considered off limits in modern China, but interview requests have been ignored.
The frustration that Chinese journalists and intellectuals feel about the dictatorial, unaccountable body was best summed up last year in a long, scathing internet essay by Peking University journalism professor Jiao Guobiao . 'The nature of its work is the complete opposite of that of a modern civilisation. Where else can you find propaganda departments? Not in the US, the UK or Europe,' he wrote. 'But you did find them in Nazi Germany, where Goebbels said 'a lie that is repeated 1,000 times becomes the truth'.'