Establishing automated syndromic surveillance in rural China was improper due to lack of required hardware facilities. Thus, more convenient syndromic surveillance method is needed. Before establishing system, ten targeted symptoms (i.e, fever, cough, sore throat, diarrhea, nausea/vomiting, headache, rash, mucocutaneous hemorrhage, convulsion and disturbance of consciousness) were determined under surveillance after epidemiological analysis on historical data of infectious diseases, literature review, expert consultation meeting, workshop and field investigation. This abstract describes the process of selecting the targeted symptoms, which may provide methods and evidences for other resource poor settings to construct similar surveillance system.