HUMOROUS:
BEIJING (Reuters) - ''Is Lewinsky with the KGB?'' screams a headline in a popular Chinese magazine.
As the White House sex scandal unfolds, the racier publications on Beijing newsstands are having a field day with the story, even as staid newspapers such as the People's Daily report the simple facts without the tawdry details.
Packed with gossip on President Clinton's plight, the latest issue of Guandong Writer magazine would make Western tabloid editors green with envy.
The cover story is entitled ''Clinton's Sex Scandal: White House or Palace of Lust?''
Its most sensational allegation: Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky was sent to Washington, when she was a child in the 1970s, as a Cold War agent on a mission to sexually ensnare the president and
destabilize U.S. politics.
''Information has exposed Monica Lewinsky as a spy assigned by the former Soviet Union. Her mission was to drag a U.S. president through the mud!'' the article said.
The story was attributed to a retired KGB official who now runs a karaoke bar in Moscow.
Beijing is buzzing with the story, which is taken as fact by many residents.
''Isn't Lewinsky a Russian spy?'' said 38-year-old Xu Tieliang, as he dug into his pockets for cash to buy cigarettes at a street market.
''I read it in one of the little papers. Maybe the American newspapers are scared to print it,'' he said.
Clinton is a familiar and well liked figure in China, where he appeared uncensored on national television during a groundbreaking visit in June.
Officially, China is silent on the sex scandal. ''We don't comment on that,'' said a foreign ministry official Tuesday in response to a reporter's question.
State media largely ignored the story until U.S. independent counsel Ken Starr issued his report alleging potential grounds for Clinton's impeachment.
Even then, stories in the Communist Party mouthpiece, the People's Daily -- a benchmark of political correctness in China -- have been terse and buried on the inside pages. Lurid details of oral sex have been ignored.
The popular media, including tabloids and city broadsheets, tested the limits of official tolerance by initially running news briefs.
Sensing the coast was clear, they abandoned caution, and now Clinton's follies are grist for radio talk-shows and full-page newspaper spreads.
The subject matter has ranged from salacious gossip to poignant political commentary.
The Yangcheng Evening News, a southern daily, Tuesday splashed fuzzy pictures apparently skimmed from the Internet portraying Clinton with a ''mystery woman'' it dubbed ''the second Monica Lewinsky.''
Other papers have taken a crack at putting the scandal in context for Chinese readers, while poking fun at U.S. hysteria.
''Sometimes you simply don't know whether to laugh or cry over Western democracy. In what is supposedly the 'sexually liberated' West, people are really making a mountain out of a molehill,'' said the Guandong Writer.
A commentary in China Women's News entitled ''Poor Fellow'' starts out by moralizing about Clinton's excesses, but ends up praising the United States for having ''stricter supervision than any country on earth'' over its government.
If a president could be skewered for something as slight as a character problem, the commentary said ''what official over there would ever dare to engage in corruption.''
In a wry jab at Chinese politics, the author suggested that Clinton could avoid public scrutiny if he were a Chinese official instead of an American one.
''It wouldn't hurt for you to give up the presidency and become head of a Chinese township or village. Maybe then you won't be sullied for a little 'morality problem,''' it said.
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