Public helped shape policies

The Government Work Report for 2017 drew upon the wisdom of the public offered in more than 2,000 suggestions selected from hundreds of thousands of messages submitted in an annual online poll.

The poll, called Share Your Thoughts with Premier Li (Keqiang), was conducted from Dec 20 to March 16 through the State Council's website and 28 other websites. It was the third time that such a poll had been carried out.

Netizens left more than 400,000 messages as part of the poll, exceeding the numbers left in the two previous polls, conducted in 2015 and January 2016, according to an analysis report released on Monday by the State Council website's operational center.

A majority of the messages were left in Chinese, but some 2,165 messages were left in foreign languages, according to the report.

During this year's two sessions, 2,071 messages were selected and reported to the State Council team that drafted the Government Work Report, Wang Yao, deputy editor-in-chief of the operational center of the State Council's website, said on Monday.

The top three topics for the Chinese messages were livelihood and social insurance, housing, and education. The top three topics for the messages left in foreign languages were the environment, education and diplomacy.

Liu Yingjie, head of the information department under the State Council's Research Office, said that the team has "adopted a wide range of netizens' suggestions" during the process of drafting and revising the Government Work Report for 2017.

The suggestions adopted in the report are on issues that have drawn wide attention from the public, according to Liu. They include cutting excessive fees imposed on companies, preventing housing prices from rising too quickly in some cities and action on environmental pollution such as smog.

This year's Government Work Report, Liu said, has been called practical by many because it has taken advice from people from across the country, including from a large number of netizens, and has answered the public's concerns.

Chinadaily.com.cn was among the websites that helped gather the public's suggestions online for the poll, and was among the three websites that received the largest number of messages in foreign languages.

Zhang Yue contributed to this story.