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E-government
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Overview China, like other countries, has found generating commercial benefits from its early National Information Infrastructure (NII) drive more difficult than anticipated. It is not just a matter of building infrastructure; tangible broad policy guidance and active government intervention is also necessary, but in China this urge to develop an online presence has been both tempered by and driven by the government’s contradictory relationship with its citizenry. Tempered because of its ongoing wariness of what a medium such as the Internet may introduce and because the Internet may prove to be beyond the control of the government; driven because the Internet may very well prove to be a tool for further government (and Party) consolidation and, perhaps more importantly, the significant tool for sustaining economic growth. The e-government framework 29 By 1998, China has set up 145 gov.cn domain names
in China. At that time, the government realized that it must utilize the
network resource to build an efficient workflow over the net. So China
Telecom brings forward a proposal of constructing an e-government.
January 1999, “government online project” has officially started. One
year after, the gov.cn domain names has increased to 1470 sites; 720
governmental departments has their own www websites. Today, according to
the CNNIC annual report, the number of gov.cn domain names has grown up
to 5864.
Main services offered by the government websites
30
Source: Survey Report on the Quantity of China's Internet Information Resources in January. 2002, China Internet Network Center
Government Online Project 31 The Government Online Project (GOP) is a three-stage initiative: Stage One: focused upon connecting 800-1,000 government offices and agencies to the Internet; Stage Two: focuses on having government offices and agencies move their information systems into compatible electronic form; Stage Three: planned to occur sometime late in the decade – will see government offices and agencies becoming paperless. The purpose of the GOP is to create a centrally accessible administrative system that collects and transports data to and from users; users being the public and the enterprise system, as well as government departments. In other words, the government’s strategy for driving the ‘information economy’ is to first launch the GOP by setting up formal government websites so that the public can acquire information and procure specific government services via the Internet. The focus then shifts to promoting office automation via government websites in order to cut down on excessive bureaucracy, and hence expenses. The government is then implementing what are known as the Enterprise Online (already launched) and Family Online Projects (yet to be properly launched) to further drive the uptake of online use and services. Official expectations for the project are as follows:
The first and second stages have been slated to take one to two years to complete (although there is some inherent ambiguity in the dates, and their likelihood of completion – as tends to be the case in all such major infrastructural undertakings), with the third stage requiring a much longer-term effort. By 2001, the project could be seen to have been reasonably successful if assessed against the government’s rather modestly stated initial ambitions of promoting an online presence and driving some early procurement activity (rather than assessing against the government’s hoped for aims of pushing information sharing, government oversight and enterprise uptake). According to the Government On-line Project Service Center (GOPSC), within one year of initiation 68 state-level government departments had put their names on-line and 60 percent of State-level departments had established sites via China’s main Internet service provider: 163/169.net. Government Online Activity 32 The Chinese government intends to conduct all government purchasing online to enhance transparency of business transaction. Departments involving trade, finance, public health, medicine supervision and logistics all promoted online purchasing in the year 2001, as well large state-owned enterprise. China’s first B2G (business to government) website was established in mid-1998 in Xiamen (prior to the national online Government drive), whereby government purchases began to be processed online. By 2001 the total purchase amount of the Xiamen government site had reached RMB382 million (USD 46 million). The site works as a reverse auction house – the government puts what they are looking to buy online, and companies then bid to become the supplier. With the early Xiamen B2G website seen to be improving the efficiency with which the government could locate sellers and expedite its buying/selling processes, the GOP campaign began to be pushed forward. From October 2001, the city government of Xian began offering online tax reporting services to its citizens. Taxpayers can fill out the various application forms and accounting statements and complete tax return statements online. Another example to illustrate the point is the Residence Certificate Center of the Public Security Bureau in Haishu District, Ningbo, which launched an online approval system for permanent residence registration. However, these are only a few examples of Chinese e-government, currently most Chinese people cannot pay their tax, obtain their driver license, ID, residence certificate, etc. from the government website, and the paperless government still has a long way to go. Fund for E-government 33 The fund for e-administration construction will be mainly covered by governments both at central and provincial levels. The investment by central government alone is reportedly standing at least over USD120 million.
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