Anyone who uses a mobile phone in China will be well acquainted with Chinese mobile phone spam. In the wee hours of the morning your phone will chirp. You stagger out of bed to the bureau thinking the office is on fire or one of your friends has been in a traffic accident, only to find a message advertising girls, goons-for-hire, weapons, black market tax receipts and any of a range of other shady products services that, naturally, no CNET reader would ever have need of. A typical one sent to my phone read:

My company has long experience selling: Guns, roofies, eavesdropping devices, fake Taiwanese currency, multiple use keys, assassins and private detectives, tax receipts and fake diplomas. Contact Ah Qiang.

Unfortunately, the usual cast of ruffians and scofflaws has been happy to take advantage of China's exploding mobile phone market. Saying that someone's business is "exploding" is one of the most onerous cliches in the English language. But when you're talking about China's mobile phone industry, no other word quite captures what has happened here in the past few years. Swell, grow, surge, balloon... none measures up to the reality.

Hmm. Will an AK47 go with this outfit?

How explosive has the growth been? Last month China's Xinhua news agency announced that there were over 416 million mobile phone subscribers in China, 23 million of whom had joined in the first four months of 2006. Another four or five million jump in every month. Even accounting for a certain amount of churn, that's something. And it's definitely faster than regulators and laws have been able to move.

Chinese people sent about 300 billion (yes, billion) SMS messages last year, or around 700 per user. Phone spammers and scammers have oozed from their dank pits to take advantage of this new market. Zany messages for shady services are just one aspect. There are endless dodgily paid SMS services, promotions, broadcasting tie-ins, lotteries, and such. Entire SMS-based industries have sprung up. China Mobile, the largest Chinese mobile telephony operator, has its own business, Monternet, designed to capitalize on the ability to offer third parties access to its enormous subscriber base. But Monternet has had problems as not all of the companies that use it have adhered to the highest ethical standards.

Part of the spam problem is the relative anonymity of mobile phone accounts in China. Given the expectations I had of China when I arrived two years ago--bureaucratic, control-obsessed, centralized--I was amazed that I could get a prepaid account for my mobile phone completely anonymously. 100 yuan in untraceable cash and 5 minutes later and I was a China Mobile subscriber.

But the regulators are trying to catch up. Late last year China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII), the regulator that oversees mobile telecommunications and the Internet, announced that all mobile phone subscribers would soon be required to register with an identity card. The operators protested and that measure hasn't been enforced yet. (More here.)

Now MII is trying again. China Technology News reported this week that the regulator's "work outline" for the year--a kind of business plan-- focuses heavily on trying to clean up the swampy SMS business in China. Spam, promotions and user identity will all come under renewed scrutiny. There are also some rumblings and rumors concerning the future of China Mobile's Monternet.

Will any of this make a difference? We'll see. China's Internet and mobile telephony industries have both grown so fast and become so huge, and China's population is so large and diverse, that regulation presents some immense practical challenges. In the meantime, those of us using Chinese mobile phone services have learned to think twice before staggering out of bed in response to that chirp that comes in the middle of the night.