In recent years, riding the wave of big data and digitalization, localities across China have accelerated digital-government construction, aiming to build "city brains" and "smart cities" to improve administrative efficiency and service quality. Yet some heavily funded digital projects have fallen into the predicament of being "idle upon completion and running empty once in operation." The digital projects of Qujing City in Yunnan Province, for example, have been exposed as unfinished or shut down.
Reporters visited the "Digital Qujing Operations Center" in an industrial park in the city and found that the once-built "city brain" and the Qujingtong app project have been abandoned. Qujingtong is a municipal government-affairs app, yet in random street interviews most residents said they knew little about it, and the few who had used it reported that apart from primary-school enrollment for their children, it had virtually no other use. Qujing's data bureau director Wang Kun revealed that as of the end of 2025, the Qujingtong app had only around 60 daily active users.
Launched in 2021, Qujingtong contains more than 70 applications, but only six were built in-house - the rest are links to other apps' functions, many of them duplicating features of Yunnan's provincial "One Phone for All Services" platform. That provincial platform was launched as early as 2019, covers government at the provincial, city, county and township levels, and has about 1.9 million registered users with roughly 21.54 million cumulative transactions. Since the provincial app is more complete and people prefer to use it, the local government's duplicate construction proved superfluous.
To promote integrated e-government construction, the State Council General Office has issued a series of documents requiring that government apps with weak practical utility be shut down and deregistered within set deadlines, and making clear that units below the county level should in principle not develop their own government apps. Localities should unify data standards and jointly build and share systems, eliminating duplicate construction at its root.
Qujing's lesson shows that digitalization should serve real needs - improving governance effectiveness and making things convenient for the public - rather than serving as window dressing. This is not only a test of the right view of achievements, but also the key to ensuring that every yuan of fiscal input delivers real results.
