In China, Communist Party takes unprecedented step: It is listening More than ever before, China's rulers are actually listening to their people, reacting quickly to contain potential crises that could threaten one-party control. With its ability to control the Internet increasingly challenged, China's Communist party has had to change its game. Thepractice 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 funneled 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. In response to government demand, opinion monitoring centers have sprung up in state-run news organizations 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. "The government used to have more power to control the agenda," said a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, who requested anonymity because of restrictions on talking to foreign reporters. But now there is a new approach, to identify the hot spots and try to control the crisis. The idea of actually listening to the opinions of the Chinese people is a radical departure for a Communist dictatorship more used to persecuting ordinary citizens for their criticism. But new leader Xi Jinping warned in June that "winning or losing public support" could decide the party's "survival or extinction," according to state-run news agency Xinhua. Increasingly, public opposition to a proposal can shape policy, although not yet on issues vital to the party's interests, like political reform. Last month), for example, a woman won compensation for being unjustly imprisoned in a labor camp after her cause was taken up online. Her crime had been to demand punishment for officials she accused of raping her daughter. Several construction projects have stalled in the face of opposition from netizens: plans for an aluminium processing plant in southern China were canceled last month, after street protests and online outrage. Netizens have also played a role in exposing official corruption, and experts count more than 170 party officials who have been prosecuted as a result of being exposed online. Every government department, at the central and provincial level, has units devoted to public opinion research, but they tend to function very imperfectly, to produce reports that "justify what my boss is talking about, that it is the right thing," said Victor Yuan Yue, chairman of Horizon Research Consultancy.