The practice of collecting information on its citizens is as old as China itself: the nation's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, maintained a massive network of spies. The Communist party's own journalists have long funnelled to party leaders classified reports on what is really happening at ground level. But now, the government is trying to understand public opinion on an unprecedented scale. Opinion-monitoring centres have sprung up in state-run news organisations and universities to mine and interpret the vast rivers of chatter on the internet. At the same time, the authorities are contracting firms to poll people about everything from traffic management to tax policy.
Conscious of staying on the good side of public opinion, and despite cracking down more conspicuously than ever before on dissident voices, the Party is more eager than ever to listen to netizens. The usual tactics of quietly ignoring issues doesn't work too well, especially when individual miscarriages of justice can be publicized so easy on microblogs, such as Weibo.
"In the Weibo era, an internet public opinion crisis cannot be handled by evading and dodging," it concluded. "Facing the questions directly, speaking with the facts, convincing people by sincerity is the key to resolve the problem." Law enforcers, it added, needed to respect the law. "Only when the law has the final say, can society have real peace."
Of course, leaders aren't too interested in ideas of political reform, and the system works both ways, measuring the popularity of party ideas, and cracking down on those who don't don't toe the party line.
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