E-government in China: Bringing economic development through administrative reform

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.