E-Government in China Keeping up with the Joneses?.

This paper discusses the development of e-government in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The paper conceptualizes a political economy framework for evaluating the development of e-government in the PRC by integrating socio-economic approaches for the study of state in terms of maximizing service quality and enhancing economy and cost-efficiency, as well as using a model of democracy which sees political deliberation and participation as the potential for the development of a civic society. It argues that while researchers actually aim at capturing a picture of politico-economic development of the states through a close examination of their digital arms, e-governments, their frameworks to examine the latter, are out of the political or economic focus: that is, these conceptual frameworks are simply a mismatch to what they would like to explicate. With a new model applied to the PRC's e-government of the central authorities, we find out that the PRC's egovernment is highly tinted toward a service model, and if any political function that a certain e-government of a certain bureau has to carry out, it is an ideological propaganda or its equivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]