Chinese scholar Wu Zuolai revealed on January 25, 2016, that Gao Hua's collection The Realm of History, which includes the late historian's essays, lecture notes, book reviews and observations, was halted just ahead of publication by Party censors, who ruled it "forbidden". The book was announced by the Guangxi Normal University Press last November to mark the fourth anniversary of Gao's death. Commenting on the ban, Xi'an-based independent journalist Ma Xiaoming, who previously worked for the Party's Propaganda Department, said Chinese censors are now starting to micromanage the publishing industry, although there is rarely a paper record of their bans. He said "I worked in the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda departments for a number of years, and this sort of crackdown is nearly always carried out through verbal orders. But it's not a question of people sitting in the propaganda department censoring stuff. There isn't a single form of mass media in China that isn't controlled by the party in the first place, so they don't need censoring,"