China's Information and Communications Technology Revolution: Social Changes and State Responses by Xiaoling Zhang & Yongnian Zheng

Author:Xiaoling Zhang & Yongnian Zheng [Zhang, Xiaoling & Zheng, Yongnian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134042623
Goodreads: 17475368
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Table 4.1 Comparison of government online services in China and EU, 2006

The gap of about 35 points is remarkable, but it is even much greater in practice, because, according to the statement about how the scores are assessed in the research project, the EU’s government online services cover much more items than those in China, and the comparison is actually not conducted based on the same criteria, which greatly favors China. For example, the scores of EU e-government assessments cited in the table are based on 20 categories of public service a governmental website may provide to its citizens, including income tax, enterprise tax, job seeking, personal files, business registration, automobile registration, construction project permission, environmental permission, custom service, public library service, public health service, marriage and birth, public security case reporting, statistics information, education, social welfare and benefits, social donation, and more. At the same time, the Chinese scores are based on only five categories, which are governmental guidelines, business consultation, application, online payment and inter-governmental departmental coordination. As the last category is not really about anything between citizens and government, but just an intra-bureaucratic activity, there are only four vague and general categories concerning governmental services that citizens may seek through websites, against 20 concrete items which residents may need to turn to for daily life and they are able to do so in Europe through e-government. Since the criteria are widely different from the Chinese ones which are apparently and greatly less demanding, a Chinese website, as the Chinese scholars admit, may obtain a score much higher than an EU website provided all conditions are equal.14 In other words, the same score in the table indicates much less quantity and much poorer quality of governmental services provided by Chinese e-government.

As investment in e-government keeps growing in China, there have been no signs, however, that in the foreseeable future this problem will be remedied. Peking University researchers conclude that government–user interaction and online public services have already become the bottleneck for the development of e-government in China.15 One may ask why the government has invested in establishing e-government as a digital extension of the government and yet provides very little function of the government? A possible answer lies in China’s pre-digital resources performance. In totalitarian China, governmental services were also of low quality even though the communist regime had a government of a vast size that extended its reach to society in a degree that any other government is not able to. State control, rather than governmental services, was a major function of the state machine in that historical circumstance.16 This logic has seemingly not been altered with the economic marketization under political authoritarianism, nor by the flourishing of advanced information technologies. The expansion of the government in digital space thus means more for the presence of the state than for the service delivery by the state, and more for the bureaucratic purposes than for the administrative functions, as will be further illustrated below with the performance of Chinese e-government in other dimensions.

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