Smartphone snapshots encourage participation

The increasing popularity of smartphones has led many Chinese to take pictures of nearly anything and everything in sight.

While most capture images of beautiful scenery, the meals they're eating for the day or their friends, others use mobile phone photography to engage in social criticism.

In a recent case, one netizen took a photo of Chinese characters reading "Ding Jinhao was here" that were written on the side of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian temple.

The photo was uploaded to Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblogging site, on May 6, with tens of thousands of netizens posting messages criticizing the tourist responsible for the graffiti.

It was discovered later that Ding is a 15-year-old boy from the city of Nanjing in east China's Jiangsu Province. His parents apologized for his act in a local newspaper.

China has 277 million 3G subscribers, according to figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The number of smartphone users is around 360 million and the number of registered Sina Weibo users exceeds 530 million.

Smartphone photos have also been used to reveal instances of corruption and wrongdoing.

Zhou Shaoqiang, a top manager at a state-owned company in the city of Zhuhai, was removed from his post earlier this year after a man who dined with him and other employees shared photos of expensive liquor that was purchased at the public's expense.