Beijing still struggles to make voice heard through Sina Weibo

This week's political meetings in Beijing will be attended by thousands of the nation's most powerful lawmakers, hundreds of whom reach out to their communities back home through social media sites such as Sina Weibo.

While the number of verified government accounts on Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblog service, has grown steadily over the past few years, it remains to be seen how effective they are in influencing public opinion.

Beijing has long recognised the sway of social media and sought to control it. In 2013, Premier Li Keqiang said the administration was in the "era of weibo", and Li Jingtian, senior vice-president of the Communist Party's Central Party School, told the Davos forum social media was strengthening oversight of Chinese officials, and this was "a very good thing".

As of October, there were 100,151 government Sina Weibo accounts, 66,830 of which were department ones and 33,321 belonging to individual officials, according to a report by the People Online Public Monitoring Office.

Of the individual accounts, only 36 belong to those in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. Nearly 1,890 were slightly below minister-level, and just over 10,250 were at the county-level, while the rest were held by lower level officials.

"The government is making effective use of Sina Weibo both through official accounts and a more modest number of personal accounts of officials," said Jeremy Goldkorn, a media expert.