WHAT happens to people who complain to the authorities in China? Some might guess that they are carted off and never seen again. That does occur. China has a system inherited from imperial times allowing citizens who have been on the receiving end of official injustice to go to a “petitioning bureau” and appeal for redress. In practice, many such petitioners have found themselves in “black jails” (extra-legal detention centres) for their pains. But China’s leaders do not disapprove of complaints altogether. Indeed they are encouraged at the local level, through the mechanisms of “mayor’s mailboxes” and of 12345 hotlines. What are they?

Mayor’s mailboxes exist on the websites of almost all of China’s 300 or so municipal governments. Citizens click the button next to the picture of the mayor that says “send me a letter” to directly e-mail their administrators. The 12345 hotlines are similar. Dialling 12345 from anywhere in the country connects a caller to the local government switchboard, whose operators should (in theory) put them through to someone who can answer questions, whether they be about schools, housing or any other local-government business. The first hotline was set up in 1983. In the 1990s new local-government phone services were added pell-mell. Municipal authorities have recently been trying to bring order to the mess they created, using 12345 as a one-stop-shop for grievances. Shanghai’s 12345 hotline was launched in 2013, Guangzhou’s in 2015. From July 2017, says the central government, all local governments must meet minimum standards, including answering 12345 calls within 15 seconds and being open 24 hours a day.

Why does the government encourage these feedback systems even as it cracks down on petitioning bureaus? Part of the answer is that leaders think hotlines will improve local government, the most unpopular layer of the Chinese state. A study by the Standardisation Administration, a part of the government that sets national standards, found that the hotline in Jinan, capital of Shandong province on the east coast, did seem to enhance local administration there. Elsewhere, though, hotlines have been failures. A survey by Dataway Horizon last year found that in Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi and Qinghai—less-developed provinces in the west—only a fifth of calls were answered on the first attempt. As a result the  spread of hotlines and mailboxes has not made a dent in the relentless rise of anti-government demonstrations (mostly against local authorities). Improving or popularising government is not the whole story.

The other reason the central government likes hotlines and mailboxes is that they provide information that officials cannot get in any other way. In a dictatorship, there are no elections to reflect public opinion and no free press to express people’s concerns. In China, online censorship is so comprehensive that complaints are squashed before they ever reach authorities’ ears. Moreover, Communist officials spend all their time talking to one another about internal party matters, rather than to ordinary citizens about public concerns. The result is that they have little idea what the people, in whose name they govern, want or think. Phone calls and e-mails about local concerns therefore provide significant insight. Greater government transparency and accountability would, of course, help the party acquire much better information, but those are inconceivable at the moment. Until that changes, hotlines are the only windows officials have into the world of public opinion.