By Jonah Greenberg
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has opened up its annual parliamentary session to suggestions via text messaging in an unusual step to amplify the voice of the people -- or at least the voice of the country's 150 million mobile phone owners.
Using the Short Message Service (SMS) now in vogue in China -- the world's largest mobile market -- cellphone users can send text to the 2,987 deputies of the National People's Congress (NPC), an official at China's official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday.
The 1-cent-per-message service offered by Xinhua and China Mobile Communications Corp, China's dominant state-owned mobile operator, eases freedom of expression in a country going through profound economic and social change.
"This is a new channel to become familiar with public opinion," said Wu Jingcai, the deputy-director of Xinhua's domestic service.
But most mobile phone owners informally polled by Reuters said either they had no interest in using their cellphones to speak their minds to the annual two-week congress or doubted their messages would be taken seriously.
"Yes, you can raise the issues in this new, exciting way. But there will be no result," said a young advertising executive in Beijing who asked not to be identified.
"In fact, the government already knows what problems the people have. They know better than we do."
AFTER WTO
On the NPC's first day Tuesday, Xinhua had received more than 2,000 messages from around the country expressing a host of concerns at the outset of China's first year in the World Trade Organization and a year that begins a leadership reshuffle.
Read one message seen by Reuters: "I'd like to know to what extent peasants will bear the brunt when the price of grain falls after China joins the WTO."
The sender identified himself as Wang Zhiyuan, "an entrepreneur and a peasant."
Xinhua's Wu said all the messages would be handed over first to the administrative office of the NPC, which would include them in a "brief internal report" handed out to deputies.
Asked whether messages would be filtered out if they were too provocative, Wu said people may say "almost anything."
Other messages raised issues that featured high in Premier Zhu Rongji's opening speech Tuesday, such as hopes that official corruption could be wiped out.
Other messages called for boosting payments from China's creaky pension fund.
TESTING FREEDOMS
The new service lets people test the bounds of a new freedom of expression in China, where politically charged jokes have begun to spread like wildfire from the Internet onto cellphones via newly popular SMS services, analysts said.
Some China watchers cited the possible danger of calling attention to oneself by submitting political grievances to the NPC in a country where state security agents patrol the Internet and phone lines to monitor political dissent.
But young Chinese disagreed.
"The Mao Zedong era is long gone," said a young artist in Beijing.
"However, if you were to say by SMS 'Let's meet at Tiananmen Square tomorrow morning at such and such a time,' then you might have a problem," the artist said, referring to the site of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 that ended in bloodshed.
Others said that anyone really seeking to dodge state security monitors would be able to buy a pre-paid phone card and send anonymous SMS messages.
Wu said after collecting the messages, for which Xinhua had not sought government approval, it would distribute them through its news media outlets around China.
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