دولت در چین: آوردن توسعه اقتصادی از طریق اصلاحات اداری

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.

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 driving force behind many of China's e-government applications at both the national and local levels. This reengineering of the public administration, in turn, is motivated by a desire to stimulate economic progress. More specifically, we will suggest that within China, IT applications in government are intended to concurrently aid economic development by supporting a more decentralized and transparent public administration and to provide the central government with tools to provide the information necessary to high level government monitoring and control.

We have argued that China's leaders are explicitly deploying e-government applications in order to bring about administrative reforms by transforming government functions, streamlining procedures, and enhancing transparency. These reforms, in turn, are designed to support China's economic development agenda. Understanding this focus together with the broader political–economic context of China helps to explain how e-government programs can resolve the seeming tension between economic development (requiring information decentralization) and administrative control (information centralization). We clarify this point through brief case studies of actual e-government experiments at both the national and city level. These cases illustrate the relationship between national-level efforts and administrative reforms implemented at the local level. Whether the strategy of hierarchical decentralization through e-government being pursued by China will be successful remains an interesting question for continued study.