He nods his head and beams when others refer to him as a "public hearing expert". Indeed, Cui Yansheng merits the title: In the last six years, the 69-year-old has attended 21 public hearings in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang Province.

    In other words, he missed only one meeting. "It occurred to me that democracy was, in fact, within arms' reach when I attended the first hearing in 2000," recalls Cui, who has lived in this city for more than half a century.

    The 1996 Law on Administrative Punishment officially introduced the public hearing system, a brand-new notion to most Chinese. Under the law, any Chinese citizen can appeal to the authorities if fined "a significant sum of money" or for example, if his driving license were revoked.

    A public hearing system was added to the Law on Pricing in 1998: a hearing must be held by authorities before fixing the price of certain public services, especially utilities.

    Borrowed from the West, the idea quickly took off in China.

    "I deem the hearing system a highly functional platform for the presentation of our voice," says Cui, who before retirement in 1998 was an engineer at the Hangzhou Machine Tool Group.

    Cui can still recall his first hearing about improving the administration of public gardens in Hangzhou, a famous travel destination in China. That summer, Cui cycled through the city collecting visitors' opinions and then surprised everyone by presenting them at the hearing.