Horizon's surveys conducted between 2002 and 2008 found three major trends: big city mayors in Beijing and Shanghai, and those in eastern cities, tend to enjoy higher popularity than their counterparts in China's west; people tend to like mayors who are in office for years and distrust new faces; and nearly 60 percent of respondents expressed a willingness to vote in mayoral elections.

By the time the 2008 poll was published, Zhang's nervousness had abated. She said there are now very few angry calls from secretaries of poorly rated mayors and more calls for detailed polling results for self-improvement. "Due to the changes in China's political environment, our poll has lost its novelty and government officials are used to listening to public comments," said Zhang.

The public, too, has grown more used to commenting to a polling company about civil servants. Yuan said more than 20 percent of people stopped by pollsters refused to answer questions in the first year the survey was conducted, some saying they feared being arrested for criticizing a mayor. Now the rejection rate has dropped to around 4 percent, Yuan said.

Yuan's company was first commissioned by the Tianjin Municipal Government in 1997 to survey business investor satisfaction toward government services. Yuan said the early projects helped his company gain the experience necessary to later undertake self-funded social opinion polls.

Now Horizon spends several million yuan a year financing around 60 opinion polls on social issues, including those scoring confidence in mayors, assessing public services and measuring quality of life.

"Ideally, the Central Government will someday commission us to poll on every mayor's performance, " said Yuan, who holds a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University and a doctorate from Peking University, and who has authored or coauthored hundreds of papers and books on opinion polls. He has also participated in designing national surveys on migrant workers and sex workers.

Yuan said he believed that the wisdom of ordinary people should serve as a reference point for decision-makers, whether they are political or business leaders. "China's current political environment, featuring the new policies of putting people first and building a harmonious society, is conducive to the development of policy surveys," said Yuan.

Yuan's optimism is not baseless. Horizon's current clients range from the government departments of 56 Chinese cities to the government ministries, among others. Big cities like Beijing and Shanghai have commissioned Horizon every year to survey public satisfaction of government services. The results are used as the key reference to evaluate departmental performance.

In recent years, the government is increasingly considering polling results as a tool to improve government institutions. In May, the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which is in charge of administrating personnel within the Party, announced the results of a national survey on public satisfaction over how the Party promotes officials. The public's overall rating on the Party's organization work was 73.55 out of 100, selection and promotion of officials received a rating of 67.04 and 66.84 on the work of preventing and redressing corruption in the promotion process. Many netizens praised the Organization Department's courage to publicize the middling ratings.

This survey was conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics, which started distributing nearly 80,000 questionnaires last July in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions. The Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee announced that this survey, centering on officials' promotions, would be conducted annually.