This article examines the strategies used to foster citizens' interaction with government microblogs. While government agencies are urged to adopt social media, little is known about how citizens... Show More

This article examines the strategies used to foster citizens' interaction with government microblogs. While government agencies are urged to adopt social media, little is known about how citizens respond to those efforts. Using data collected from the publicity microblogs of prefecture-level municipalities in China, this article indicates that government microblogs can foster citizen-initiated interaction by acquiring microblog influencers as followers, diversifying the sources of government posts and posting more multimedia content. However, regularly updating a government microblog is not necessarily associated with citizen participation.

By using the 2014 randomly sampling survey of 36 major cities in China, the author empirically examines the status and predictors of e-government use by citizens. The author finds that nearly one... Show More

By using the 2014 randomly sampling survey of 36 major cities in China, the author empirically examines the status and predictors of e-government use by citizens. The author finds that nearly one third of the respondents accessed online services of city government websites, and the sampled cities vary substantially in the percentage of e-government uptake. The results show that e-government use is primarily driven by citizen trust in government, age, education, and income, whereas political efficacy, gender, nationality, household types, and occupations are not significant. There is a notable digital divide in relatively disadvantageous groups, and the government should pay particular attention to boost e-government use among these individuals.

This article examines citizens' use of the Internet as a popular feedback mechanism, and argues that it can help improve institutional performance. Specifically, it assesses the relationship between... Show More

This article examines citizens' use of the Internet as a popular feedback mechanism, and argues that it can help improve institutional performance. Specifically, it assesses the relationship between Internet penetration rate and public service delivery across 31 first-level administrative divisions in People's Republic of China from 1997 to 2014. A hierarchical linear modelling was conducted using secondary data released by the National Bureau of Statistics and the China Internet Network Information Centre. The result shows a positive relationship between Internet penetration rate and public service delivery when controlling for GDP per capita and education level. The positive relationship increases over time in general. The implications of Internet use for performance-based legitimacy and its impact on political change (or stability) in the authoritarian context are further discussed.

This article describes how as part of the reform of the administrative system of China, most local governments have set up public service centers; meanwhile, ICT (Information and Communication... Show More

This article describes how as part of the reform of the administrative system of China, most local governments have set up public service centers; meanwhile, ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has been commonly applied to make e-services more convenient, efficient and transparent. However, the existing studies in the Chinese context are mostly qualitative and the relationship between service quality and citizen satisfaction has not been tested. This article adopted the D&M model to develop an e-service quality model and tested the impact of service quality on citizen satisfaction. A survey was conducted and 364 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The results showed that the data fit the model well. Most of the hypotheses formulated in this article was proven. Additionally, an important finding was that the impact of service quality on specific satisfaction is stronger than that of information quality and system quality, which indicates that face-to-face services cannot simply be substituted by electronic systems. Both the theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

There are growing calls for social network analysis methods to be more extensively deployed in governance practice and research. This article develops a formal framework for whether and how netizens... Show More

There are growing calls for social network analysis methods to be more extensively deployed in governance practice and research. This article develops a formal framework for whether and how netizens change the model of public agenda setting through internet political participation. Drawing on the case of “PX Event in Zhangzhou,” this article aims to explore the social network structure in the process of micro-blog public opinion diffusion in public agendas based on SNA. By introducing the relevant theories into the research of public agenda setting, and focusing on the practice by which local governments do urban governance under the environment of internet political participation, the analysis reveals that the new whole network structure based on new media changes the action of social actors, in which consistently the mode of public agenda-setting is transformed from the traditional one-way to the interactive-way. This article extends the existing research discourse domain of public agenda setting and government response, further generalize the “Queen Bee mode” of government response.

This article describes how being pushed and pulled by a variety of external and internal factors, the Chinese government had begun to adopt and implement its smart city initiatives. Despite the... Show More

This article describes how being pushed and pulled by a variety of external and internal factors, the Chinese government had begun to adopt and implement its smart city initiatives. Despite the strong financial and institutional supports from the central government, the performances of smart city initiatives significantly vary across pilot sites. Considering smart city initiatives as government innovation and drawing on the government innovation diffusion theories, an explanatory model has been developed to examine their variance and test it with a cross-sectional dataset using multiple regression methods. It was found that although environmental pollution was a key driver for the development of smart city in China, such environmental pollution like air pollution in particular had a curvilinear relationship (bell-shaped) with smart city development. In addition, smart cities initiatives in China were driven not only by technical rationalities but also political rationalities. Political supports from local ruling party sectaries made a difference.

This article describes how with the emergence of ubiquitous technology, intelligence, and the rise of social networks facilitated by mobile Internet, big data, cloud computing and other emerging... Show More

This article describes how with the emergence of ubiquitous technology, intelligence, and the rise of social networks facilitated by mobile Internet, big data, cloud computing and other emerging technologies, it has become a global trend that digital governance has been employed in the executive branches of many countries in the world. This article explores the data of quantity of published articles, researchers, research institutes, high-frequency key words, etc., obtained through CiteSpaceIII. The analysis of the articles related to digital governance for the recent 20 years are used to perform content analysis on the research topic and evolution. The development situations and problems of digital governance research in China are analyzed based on the literature review. The future study direction is prospected.