Beijing’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has determined that government digital services and apps need to become less bureaucratic and formal.
In a notice on Monday, the government vowed to strengthen oversight and standardization of government digital services to cure machine translation of “off-the-shelf red tape”, a syndrome caused by imposing bureaucratic processes on citizen-facing apps. did.
The administration asked government departments to review their products and make timely modifications.
And if the tips do not foster behavior change, CAC conducts random inspections and assessments and recommends corrective and accountability actions against the offending entity.
The plan includes removing duplicate functionality on the app. This may mean embedding potentially overlapping functionality as modules into existing government applications, or accomplishing tasks through collaboration with other projects. The CAC also determines whether data management and sharing requirements are met within the project.
The Chinese government claimed it wanted a “user-centric approach”, meaning users would not need multiple logins and could instead use a one-stop platform. Government apps must use the government cloud and the central authentication service hosted there.
Applications that are infrequently used and have minimal utility “must be shut down and canceled,” the regulator ordered. It added that it would monitor the number of public accounts opened.
The CAC will also ban the use of the app as a worker evaluation tool.
The regulator set aside a period of one to two years to establish mechanisms for the goal, including “overall management, review and submission, evaluation feedback, cleanup and closure.”
CAC has three to five years to improve regulatory measures and strengthen oversight.
Such orders for improvements are not uncommon in China, but in recent years most of them have been aimed at quelling crime and ensuring that China’s web giants stop spreading content the Communist Party doesn’t like. There is.
For example, the CAC last month penalized Alibaba-owned search engine Quark for enabling content it deemed “dirty dancing” and live streaming platform NetEase for other content it deemed vulgar. ®