While e-government has great potential, public access is lagging Filing taxes online, at first glance a mere convenience for citizens, is an example of an e-government initiative in China that has much larger potential implications.
China launched its Government Online Project in 1999 and since then more than 10,000 government-related websites have been published on the Internet.
Apart from modernizing the management of government affairs, e-government may also help promote the transparency of government work--even reducing malpractices such as abuse of power by tax officers.
The face-to-face mode of filing taxes leaves open the possibility of some officers committing fraud for personal gain. With online filing, a service recently launched by Beijing’s taxation bureau, citizens are on a more equal footing. It also helps simplify the tax-paying process.
“In the past, in order to pay taxes, we had to visit relevant government agencies again and again because of the complicated procedures involved. Nowadays, all the work can be done without leaving my office,” said Zhou Xiaolin, who runs a private company in Beijing.
However, Zhou is among the minority of people using government services in this way. Although the concept of e-government, which refers to government services offered online, has existed for at least seven years in China, the number of users remains small.
An Internet survey conducted in 2005 shows that e-government contributed to only 2 percent of frequently used online government services. The 2-percent share seems far away from the government’s ultimate goal of making government-citizen and government-enterprise interactions as well as inter-agency relationships more convenient, transparent and inexpensive.
What, then, is preventing e-government from reaching more people?
According to Economic Information Daily, a Beijing-based newspaper, over 40,000 government websites in China can be found through online searching. Some 90 percent of the main pages of these websites, selected at random, present the latest news, but most of the important data and information on the sites are completely outdated.
Some of them haven’t been updated for years, while others have nicely designed main pages but no further content, despite the fact that the construction of a single government website can cost hundreds of thousands of yuan.
“Government website? No attention to it for quite a while. People who want to learn about government information may come directly to our offices,” said an employee at the Yancheng Food Bureau of Henan Province, when asked about the availability of online information regarding the supply and demand of agricultural produce.
In many places in China, e-government is only used as a kind of superficial public image project, or to showcase government achievements in information technology.
Yang Fengchun, vice president of the Academy of E-Government of Peking University, said the core purpose of e-government is not the information technology itself, but rather government services. The former is only a means to support the latter.
Unsurprisingly, e-government in some parts of China is far better developed than in other areas-for example, urban compared to rural-but regardless, still faces the challenge of conflict with the current government system.
The basis of e-government is transparency of government information and affairs, and this isn’t easy to achieve.
According to Wu Jinglian, an economics professor at Peking University, e-government in Western countries, which came into being in the 1970s under reforms, intended to make government affairs more open and accountable to the public.
However, when it comes to China, the majority of government agencies are used to handling public affairs through “internal regulations,” and are reluctant to use Internet and electronic technologies in the provision of public services.
The challenge is promoting the use of information technology in government work, a situation that may start improving in the near future.
A recently completed draft document titled Regulations on Information Publication of the People’s Republic of China, states that any information, as long as it doesn’t leak “state secrets” or hurt the legitimate rights of a third party, will be made available to the public. Moreover, government information must be published on official websites.
The low rate of Internet use in China is another significant obstacle for e-government to become popular among ordinary Chinese people.
Statistics from the China Internet Information Center show that China has 120 million netizens in 2005. While this is a big number, it accounts for less than 10 percent of the county’s total population of 1.3 billion. In addition, the distribution of Internet users is determined by such factors as region, age and economic status. This has further hindered the popularization of e-government.
For example, although the convenience of online tax payment exists, many people lack access to computers or the Internet, not to mention the skills to use them, and can only turn to the old system.
“As the e-government is designed to better serve all the people, we should pay attention not only to those who are familiar with the Internet, but also to those who have difficulty in using this technology,” noted Hu Xiaoming, Deputy Director of the State Information Center.
According to Hu, given the low rate of Internet use in China, e-government services should continue to be supplemented by traditional approaches, such as telephone service, for the foreseeable future.