In the waning days of the year of the tiger, Premier Wen Jiabao paid a surprise visit to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls to meet aggrieved petitioners from various parts of the country. This was the first such meeting in the 61-year history of the People's Republic.
In doing so, Wen reaffirmed his reputation as a man of the people - but it is not clear what else he achieved. For one thing, while the visit was unprecedented, it may well have been staged so that Wen only met petitioners who had been cleared to see him.
The premier, who is known for his liberal utterances, is something of a mystery. For example, in a CNN interview aired last October, he called freedom of speech indispensable and said 'the people's wishes for and needs for democracy and freedom are irresistible'. But his words were censored on the mainland and, since then, there have been no noticeable moves on the part of the government to allow the democracy and freedom that he claimed to champion.
Indeed, Wen seems unable or unwilling to change the government, leading some to call him a hypocrite. Last year, prominent author Yu Jie wrote a book which was published in Hong Kong since it couldn't be published on the mainland. Titled China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, it accused him of putting on a show when actually he and President Hu Jintao 'are on a tandem bike, heading in the same direction, playing the 'good guy, bad guy' routine'.
To be fair, this is probably going too far. True, Wen is head of the government but he has to act within the confines of the ruling Communist Party. He cannot bring about change by waving a magic wand.
There is a consistent theme to his remarks. And what he said last week at the petition office echoed his words on CNN.
Last October, he said it was important to create the conditions to allow the people to criticise the government. 'It is only when there is the supervision and critical oversight from the people that the government will be in a position to do an even better job, and employees of government departments will be the true public servants of the people,' he said.
