Today Melissa Chan, the al-Jazeera English television correspondent who, it was announced yesterday, had been expelled from China, seems to have become an "unperson" in China.
The only Chinese-language newspapers in which we could find reports on the expulsion on Wednesday morning were the Hong Kong-affiliated Ta Kung Pao paper from Henan province and the Global Times.
The decision not to grant her a new visa, effectively kicking her out, was made by the Foreign Ministry, and was significant. China has not taken such a step since 1998.
At the Foreign Ministry's daily press conference on Tuesday, 14 out of 18 questions were about the decision. Here's a helpful record of some provided by Voice Of America.
Reporters wanted to know why Melissa Chan had been expelled, what rule she had broken and whether this was some sort of warning to all of us.
Today, the Foreign Ministry's own website, which usually carries a transcript of each daily briefing seems to have expunged Ms Chan's case from the official record. There is no English transcript, just a Chinese one, and that makes no mention of any of the questions about her. Only the four other questions are recorded. The video story on the Chinese page is about the Philippines.
So China's government is in the bizarre position of having censored itself.
US 'disappointed' There wasn't much in China's responses anyway. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei refused to explain why she had been denied a new visa, saying only "the media concerned know in their heart what they did wrong".
That unfortunately isn't much help when it comes to trying to report China's position or to work out where other correspondents might fall foul of the Foreign Ministry in the future.
The most widely circulated idea is that what China really objected to was a documentary, produced not by Ms Chan but a different department at al-Jazeera, about the alleged use of prison labour to manufacture products for export, and she is being punished despite having no link to the story.
China's move has drawn protests from organisations including the US State Department, which said it was "disappointed... To our knowledge she operated and reported in accordance with Chinese law."
The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, often the target of official ire itself, said in its own statement that "this is the most extreme example of a recent pattern of using journalist visas in an attempt to censor and intimidate foreign correspondents in China". It details other cases where visas have been delayed, denied or never issued.
In 1984, George Orwell wrote about the "memory holes" down which inconvenient documents were dropped to be erased from history. This case seems to be the equivalent.
The problem with the head in the sand approach is that China has left itself voiceless, while in today's YouTube world all Ms Chan's reports are preserved online. So anyone (outside China, or with VPN technology to skirt the online censors if they are inside China) can access them and judge for themselves.

It takes a long time to get anywhere in Liberia. There are only a couple of narrow tarmac roads and the further you get from the capital, Monrovia, the more dangerous they become - pot-holes like jagged craters so steep and deep you'd never survive hitting them at speed. You have to do a lot of very violent swerving.
But there's one good thing about travelling by car (there's virtually no public transport) which is that you learn an awful lot about the country: its past, present and what they hope will be its future.
Relatively few people read the newspapers. The rest have huge public billboards at the side of the roads that tell them what the government wants them to know, how it wants them to behave.
Simplistic propaganda it may be, but if these messages do get across, the country will be a better place.
Let me take you on a drive through Bong County, starting in the state capital, Gbarnga, and introduce you to some of the billboards and their messages.
Here, as you leave the town, is my favourite: "Share ideas. Don't miss out. Go to school." What a lovely idea - a government exhorting its people to share ideas.
Civil war scars When it ended in 2003 there were vast numbers who had never been to school - sometimes because they'd been forced to flee their homes and their parents had been killed, and sometimes because they themselves had been forced to become fighters.
I talked to one young man in a primary school. He is now 18 but he is in the same class as 11-year-olds. His parents were butchered in the war. Yet he is determined to get an education. He wants to be a doctor.
Here's another billboard: "The police is your friend." Well, that rather depends on who you are.
This billboard is at one of the many checkpoints on the main roads where drivers are routinely stopped. We're close to the border with Guinea, and Liberians worry about what they call aliens and drug dealers coming in. They found someone with some drugs in his car here the other day and beat him to death.
Although people in a rural area like this are incredibly friendly to strangers like us, you sense that violence is never far below the surface. So many of the young men you meet have hard eyes. Did they fight in the civil war? Probably. They had no choice.
Rats in hospital Health is a big subject for the billboards: "No woman should die while giving life because you know what to do". Many do die in childbirth. Another one for pregnant women: "Every full belly should be checked for HIV". Aids is another big killer.
And here's another billboard a little further on: "Germs are the killers of human beings. You cannot see them". Now that's a message that has yet to be learned if the mortality figures are to be believed - and not just in this country.
It's estimated that half the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering the consequences of bad sanitation. In Liberia, six out of seven people use the bush as their toilet. There is no running water and no sanitation.
In Gbarnga you can see a big water tower but it hasn't worked for years because it was badly damaged in the war. Most people either have to pump water by hand from wells and bore-holes if they live in villages in the bush, or they get it from creeks and rivers and streams. And they are horribly contaminated by faecal matter. Almost as many people here die from diarrhoea as they do from the biggest killer, malaria.
The health service is in a wretched state. The county of Bong has a population of 350,000 people and only four doctors and four ambulances, and there is only one general hospital. It's gloomy and rather smelly and has virtually no equipment. There are no defibrillators or ventilators.
In the waiting area there is a mammogram machine. It's been there a year and has never been used. No-one knows how to use it. It's still in its wrapping. It was a gift from a misguided charity.
As I walked into an operating theatre a large rat scuttled across the floor in front of me. The doctor who was showing me around did not flinch. Yes, he said, we have a problem with rats.
As we leave Gbarnga we approach a bridge over the river. A big gang of boys and young men are working beneath this bridge.
Shopping by lantern They're here all day, several of them trying to get you to leave the road and drive down to the river bank so that their colleagues can wash your car in the river. They charge very little and they earn about a pound a day. It's better than nothing.
The truth is, it's very hard to see how the mass of people make a living in this country. Unemployment is hard to estimate. I was told by many people that it's probably more than 90%. Looking at the number of young men wandering the streets with nothing to do, that's not hard to believe.
I've never seen so many little ramshackle stores and tiny shops all selling pretty much the same stuff for a few pence.
Some of them will stay open as we drive into the night - mostly using lanterns or torches because there is no national grid, no mains electricity. Some of the bars and restaurants have their own generators so, as you look out of the car's windows, you see little patches of light here and there in the villages and the bush.
But even as you drive closer to the capital you get the sense of a country that in some ways slipped back into the dark ages. Civil war does that.
Yet it's also a country that is now clearly - visibly - capable of diagnosing its problems. It knows what needs to be done and it is using the messages on the billboards to proclaim its intentions and exhort its people to move on.

50 buts, c'est... plus ou autant que le total affiché par les trois-quarts des équipes de Ligue 1 cette saison. Seuls Montpellier, le PSG, Lille, Lyon et Evian-Thonon-Gaillard ont fait mieux ou aussi bien depuis le début de l'exercice 2011/2012. Par exemple, l'Olympique de Marseille a inscrit huit buts de moins que le prodige argentin.
50 buts, c’est… 44,6% des buts inscrits par le Barça en Liga cette saison. Les Blaugrana ont frappé à 112 reprises. En comparaison, Cristiano Ronaldo a marqué 38,4% des buts du Real Madrid (45 sur 117).
50 buts, c'est... presque aussi bien que Robin van Persie et Olivier Giroud réunis. Les deux hommes, respectivement leaders du classement des buteurs de Premier League et de Ligue 1, ont marqué 51 buts à eux deux (30 pour le Néerlandais, 21 pour le Français).
50 buts, c'est... cinq de plus que Cristiano Ronaldo qui, lui aussi, est en train de tout casser cette saison. Le Portugais a réussi à passer la barre des 40 réalisations en Liga pour la seconde saison de suite. Ça aussi, c'est époustouflant. Sauf cataclysme, il ne sera pourtant pas Pichichi. Avec 45 réalisations au compteur... au minimum.
50 buts, c'est... impensable. Surtout si vous rajoutez les 22 autres inscrits en club par Lionel Messi en 2011/2012. L'Argentin en est à 72 buts toutes compétitions confondues . Du jamais vu dans l'histoire du jeu. L'ancien record était détenu par le bombardier allemand, Gerd Muller, auteur de 67 buts avec le Bayern Munich en 1972/1973.
50 buts, c'est... plus d'un tiers des buts marqués lors de la dernière Coupe du monde. En Afrique du Sud, les filets avaient tremblé à 145 reprises. Et ils s'y étaient mis à 32 équipes pour atteindre cette marque. Pour l'anecdote, Lionel Messi n'en avait marqué... aucun.
50 buts, c'est... un de moins que Thierry Henry en équipe de France tout au long de sa carrière internationale. Le joueur de New York, 123 sélections au compteur, a marqué 51 fois sous le maillot des Bleus.
50 buts, c'est... trois de plus que Dudu Goergescu. L'attaquant roumain détenait jusqu'à samedi soir le record de buts marqués dans un championnat européen. En 1976/1977, le Soulier d'Or avait frappé 47 fois avec le Dinamo Bucarest.
50 buts, c’est… le total de Messi à une journée de la fin du Championnat d’Espagne. Ce n’est donc peut-être pas fini. Rendez-vous samedi prochain pour le feu d'artifice final.