A recent magazine article detailing the baffling inner workings of China’s “black PR” industry—where companies pay to have bad press scrubbed from the Chinese Internet—has, itself, been taken down. The article reported on firms that had apparently figured out how to game China’s Internet monitoring and filtering system into a simple way to make money.

The Chinese-language version of an article published Tuesday in Caixin, a well-respected Beijing-based magazine, was almost instantly removed. A copy has been preserved on the New York Times’ Chinese site (Google Translate).

The inner workings of the heavily-censored Chinese Internet are often a mystery. It’s got the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” as well as the 50-Cent Party, a government-funded means of making sure nationalistic-minded comments are prevalent online. (It’s also got lots of clever Internet users that have come up with homophones as a way to poke fun at the government’s Internet policy.)

Caixin’s English-language site offers a version—apparently not a precise translation—profiling Yage, a highly-profitable company that has engaged in content removal for corporate clients (including Pizza Hut, Volkswagen, China Mobile, and others), local police chiefs, and political clients of “second and third tier cities,” for high fees.

The company’s founder, Gu Dengda, is currently one of “at least 10” black PR experts who have been detained by police—Gu is awaiting trial on several charges, including bribery.

The magazine reported that Yage made over 50 million RMB ($7.9 million) in profit in 2011—adding, according to a summary of the article in TechInAsia, that “getting a post deleted could cost from 1,000 to more than 10,000 RMB ($150 to $1500 or more), and getting a search keyword blocked costs more than 100,000 RMB ($16,000).”

The English-language version even quotes a “former Yage staffer” that the company’s founder once described a deal with a “nervous government official” who was even willing to pay 500,000 RMB ($80,000).