Disgruntled taxi drivers in Chongqing air their complaints following a two-day strike while a top official of the southwestern Chinese city nods intently.
``You spoke really well, thank you,'' says Bo Xilai, the Commmunist Party chief, complimenting a participant who talked with a thick regional accent. ``I was able to understand 90 percent of what you said.''
The three-hour meeting, available online across China through major Web portals, is more reminiscent of local government access in the U.S. than in a country where protests have typically met with swift repression.
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As Chinese citizens increasingly use the Internet to get news, share videos, vent frustrations and expose abuses of power, leaders are being forced to react publicly to their concerns. Government officials are also adapting traditional media-control techniques to the information age -- including sending out press releases and approved articles on topics that once would have been completely suppressed.
``They've learned that they come off looking better if they're somewhat more transparent, somewhat quicker to respond,'' says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who has studied protest in China. ``They're learning spin control.''
China has surpassed the U.S. as the world's biggest online market, with 253 million Web users at the end of June, according to the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center. The country also had 624.1 million mobile- phone subscribers by the end of September, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
