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Top1. Introduction
E-government has developed rapidly over the past decade and is gaining momentum in many countries worldwide (Zhao et al., 2014). The implementation of e-government initiatives has been reported as stimulating business process change, increasing government and citizen efficiency, and improving information sharing and social inclusion while also resulting in better transparency, accountability, and excellent proximity to citizens (Zhao et al., 2014). The Chinese government has invested much money in this area since the last century, aiming to establish a sound e-government service system (Rana et al., 2011; Sharma et al., 2018; Simintiras et al., 2015; Singh et al., 2019), promote e-government services, and call for citizen participation. However, such political ideals and administrative demands deviate from reality. People are not concerned about e-government services. This phenomenon not only appeared in China, but other countries' governments also spent much money on e-government systems. However, people are reluctant to use and share it continuously.
Currently, the majority of e-government research revolves around administrative organization's internal factors (Irfan & Wang, 2019; Jing & Deng, 2021; Deng, 2022; He & Gao, 2022; Alryalat et al., 2015; Alryalat et al., 2017; Kapoor et al., 2018; Rana et al., 2011). It is worth noting that the relevant research on e-government, especially concerning citizens, needs to focus on the external environment's influence, such as the economy, politics, and culture (Wang & Jiang, 2007). E-government under different national cultures (Erumban et al., 2006; Steers et al., 2008) is used to varying degrees by citizens (United Nations, 2020), and the penetration level of e-government to citizens is also different. People's thinking and behavior are influenced by culture (Hofstede, 2001), which affects people's decisions to use e-government services. In a word, the difference in national culture will make different countries' people have different attitudes and behaviors towards e-government platforms (e-government websites), thus affecting the penetration level of e-government websites.
Since South Korea has always been a leading country in developing e-government (United Nations, 2020), this paper chooses South Korea as a country for comparison. This paper is based on Hofstede's cultural model. Hofstede's research shows significant differences between China and South Korea in the dimensions of masculinity and femininity. China is a masculine society, and South Korea is a feminine society. Significant differences in people's ways of thinking between the two societies may influence their actual need for e-government services. This paper takes Beijing's “Window of the Capital” and Seoul's “I·Seoul·You” as the analysis websites. Takes Beijing and Seoul citizens as the analysis subjects and collects first-hand data by questionnaire survey and multistage stratification method. This paper uses SPSS 23.0 to analyze the reliability and validity of the data and AMOS 23.0 to establish a second-order structural equation model to analyze the data. This paper explores the influence of masculine and feminine dimensions on the penetration level of e-government websites. The key issues to be solved in this paper are: Taking e-government websites in Beijing and Seoul as examples, does masculinity or femininity affect the penetration level of e-government websites in the two cities? How do these factors affect the penetration level of e-government websites? What kind of e-government services should the government provide to adapt to the culture and meet the public needs?