lations which it says will promote "openness as principle, being closed off as the exception" in an effort to provide timely and accurate information to the public' As Western observers, we are conditioned to be cynical about Chinese politics and Chinese political motivation but to all intents and purposes the response by President Wen Jiabao to Making Telecoms Work the crisis seemed heartfelt and genuine and considerably more open than the response of the Burmese leadership to the Cyclone Nargis7 disaster that happened at the same time. SMS broadcasting was used to a lesser extent after the Asian Tsunami8 in 2004 but appears to be becoming an alternative to radio as a mechanism for disseminating government information in an emergency. 11.3 The Mobile Phone as a Dominant Communications Medium? Can you get to as many people by phone in China as you can by radio? Well no. According to the Chinese State Administration of Radio there are 1.2 billion people in China listening to long-wave, medium-wave and VHF radio. According to our colleagues at The Mobile World, as at March 2008 there were 557.8 million cellular subscribers in China. Radio therefore still had the advantage in terms of numeric reach but this discounted two factors, cellular subscribers in China were being added at a rate of nine million per month and three years later had passed the one billion user mark. By the time you read this, the mobile phone will be the dominant communications medium by user volume. Cellular users in China, anecdotally at least, are also more likely to have their phones on rather than their radios at any particular time. Mind you, many of the phones have an FM radio, which is a much used function both in China and particularly India (see also Chapter 21). Whether it will also be a dominant payment and transaction medium is open to debate and this may be determined by how easy it is to use, which in turn may be determined by how successfully near-field communication is implemented as an enabling technology for the contactless s