Paper short abstract:

The Chinese government has long been striving to promote e-government to digitalise public services. While the huge population and regional economic imbalances contribute to digital inequality in e-government. We analyse how to tackle the problem by coordinating social and technical subsystems.

Paper long abstract:

Urbanisation and its related public management problems, coupled with the ICT Revolution, gave birth to the Electronic Government concept (E-government) (Sharma and Kalra, 2019). E-government relies on ICTs, such as blockchain, big data, cloud computing (Hashemi et al, 2013), information infrastructure (Bekkers, 2009) and related software systems (Ziemba et al., 2014) to deliver public services (Kassen, 2022). The purposes of e-government are to enhance government functions, create a more efficient, streamlined, open and transparent government, and provide better services for the public, enterprises and society (Nam et al., 2022).

While digital inequality is evitable in e-government in China because of its massive population and regional economic inequalities. Citizens being familiar with mobile Internet enjoy convenience while citizens lacking digital literacy are even more difficult to access public services due to the decreasing offline services.

E-government is not only simply to offer traditional government services online through ICTs but also to reorganise the government structure, reengineer operation processes of public sectors, and transform the culture of government (Sharma and Kalra, 2019). So addressing digital inequality in e-government also calls for a socio-technical lens.

This research performed a case study and found that the popularity of network infrastructure is a prerequisite for digital inequality. Then the technology innovations should be user-friendly and scenario. In the socio-subsystem, the organisation structure, governance process and administrative culture must coordinate with the technology development. And another key factor is stakeholder engagement, such as Internet companies with a large user base helping to promote e-government applications.