During a recent two-week stay in Guangzhou, China, the country's third largest city after Beijing and Shanghai, I met with three local professors working on China's digital government to learn more about how the system works. I had a chance.
A key part of China's digital government is the country's formal system for receiving and registering online complaints and comments from citizens regarding government services. This grew out of an old imperial dynasty custom in which people dissatisfied with mistreatment by local officials would go to Beijing and lodge complaints with designated court officials.
About 15 years ago, reports began to emerge that local officials were kidnapping and imprisoning local residents attempting to travel to Beijing, but these abuses have decreased significantly over time. More recently, the government has begun establishing in-person “Citizen Service Centers” as one-stop shops for obtaining information and registering complaints. I wrote about Shanghai's “Citizen Service Center” for FCW in 2016.
However, in the digital age, dissatisfied people have started filing complaints online instead of going to Beijing or going to face-to-face service centers to file complaints. And in recent years, a common way for people to enter complaints and comments is by using their smartphones, rather than by visiting his website as in the United States.
Complaints, comments, and online service requests across China are handled by the government through two of China's largest mobile companies, Alipay (founded by tech entrepreneur Jack Ma) and WeChat Pay, the social network's mobile payment arm. entered into a system operated by Wechat. He is one of only two vendors recognized by the government as a forum for comments, complaints, and service requests. From a consumer's perspective, it's much easier to know where to go to have this type of interaction. The US system has so many places to go that many people may not know where to go. Chinese people are also more familiar with mobile payment systems than Americans, and they use them much more often than credit cards to make payments.
These same two platforms are also used to apply online for services provided by the government to all citizens, such as purchasing train tickets, renewing driver's licenses and government-issued ID cards, and making doctor's appointments. In total, approximately 100 services are all available through this system.
The government also targeted Huawei (a telecommunications company that became famous in the U.S. after government agencies banned the company because data obtained by the company could be handed over to the Chinese government) and Alibaba (Jack Mar ) were selected. – Founding parent of Alipay) and responsible for promoting public usage of digital government services.
The Chinese government's contracting system is winner-takes-all. While the Chinese are more willing to encourage centralized decision-making, we are likely more likely to see the performance and quality advantages of multiple vendors who can bid against each other to win a piece of the business. Probably. .
One interesting feature of the Chinese system is that people can earn points on their social credit score by taking and sending photos of potholes. Social Credit is a system in China that has been criticized by Western countries as enabling extrajudicial retaliation against political dissidents by making loans harder to obtain or charging higher interest rates. Sometimes. The system here rewards people who share information about the local situation. Such photos are posted on websites and are considered a way to crowdsource information.
One of the professors I spoke to was concerned that these systems were fairly complex to use and not user-friendly. (Although the government has closed many in-person citizen service centers, there are still some.) He even used the term “digital divide” to describe the state of citizen use of these services. So some things are the same in both countries.
