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ABSTRACT
Within China, government leaders are using information technology to drive efforts
both to accelerate decentralized public administration and, at the same time, to enhance
government’s ability to oversee key activities. The concurrent pursuit of these two seemingly
paradoxical objectives is, in turn, motivated by an explicit desire to modernize and make more
competitive the Chinese economy. Considering what Chinese leaders mean by ‘administrative
reform’ is a key to resolving the apparent contradiction between administrative decentralization
and government oversight. In particular, this paper provides a number of illustrations of how
Chinese e-government initiatives can be best understood as vehicles intended to support
economic development through an increasingly transparent and decentralized administration
while at the same time providing the central government the information and ability to efficiently
monitor and, potentially steer, economic activity at a more abstract level.
I. Introduction
Through e-government, China’s leaders expect to foster administrative reforms by
transforming government functions, streamlining procedures, and enhancing administrative
transparency. This expectation helps to resolve two seemingly contradictory objectives for e-
government in China. On the one hand, leaders are striving to use e-government as an engine for
economic development and, on the other hand, they want to further consolidate certain roles for
the central government. This article argues that understanding what the leaders mean by
“administrative reform” provides a key to resolving this seeming contradiction. To accomplish
this, the authors will outline some of the e-government applications now being introduced in
China. In so doing we spend some time examining the reasons Chinese leaders have given for
wanting to use information and communication technologies (ICTs) within government. In
particular, we will provide evidence that administrative reform, Xingzheng Guanli Tizhi Gaige,
(in Chinese three somewhat distinct concepts: (1) transforming government functions; (2)
reengineering government process; and (3) enhancing government transparency) has been a
Convention