Survey reveals Web of frustration

Interaction

According to the report, only 24 percent of the government websites studied allowed for public interaction. Low-quality responses to users' comments were another big problem.

One response on the website of Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui province, became one of the top jokes of 2010. In September, one netizen inquired online about the office hours of the city's education department during the Mid-Autumn Festival. A few days later, the netizen received a reply saying, "Please Baidu it" - use the popular Chinese search engine.

The Hefei municipal government later apologized, saying the response came from an employee who was "not in a good mood".

"Comments like that really make us feel let down by the municipal government," said Kong Rongrong, 25, a postgraduate student at Hefei University of Technology. "It will take a long time to redeem people's trust in our government websites and government, although it was a one-off incident.

"People ask questions online because they trust that the government can help them solve their problems," she said. "They (local officials) really should take people's questions online seriously and answer them with respect."

Some government websites do that. The site run by Xindu District in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan province, rarely censors people's questions, and the government responds online.

One district resident left a message saying, "Our village head must be taking bribes because he is so fat," and the reply was, "Thanks for your question but please note that taking bribes or not has nothing to do with body weight." The humorous reply won a round of applause from netizens.

"We never ignore any questions because we know how important they are to the people. There is nothing to hide because we are open and confident," said Yang Jianzhen, who is in charge of answering and directing online questions. The website's response rate has reached 99.9 percent.

Staff responsibility

Most of China's government websites are run by information-oriented government administration offices, but whether they are successful and efficient depends on work by all departments, said Zhang, the testing center executive.

"The performance of government websites depends on the degree of importance attached to them by chief officials," said Chang Zhonghua, director of the information-oriented government administration office of Shaanxi province.

The testing center ranked the Shaanxi government website fourth of all those tested in China. The top three were the government websites of Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai.

Chang said the authorities in his area direct all questions collected online to all 120 operational departments of the Shaanxi government, and those departments have appointed people to handle online questions and requests. As instructed by Zhao Yongzheng, governor of Shaanxi province, the head of each department is directly responsible for dealing with more complicated cases.

The quality and speed of responses to online inquiries are among the criteria that measure each department's job performance. As a result, departments compete with each other to solve people's problems, Chang said. "People's questions actually help them a lot in policy-making in many ways."

Website employees are also required to collect all negative news about Shaanxi and report it to the governor. Later, they will post his comments, making the government website the first to present official voices because people have the right to know top officials' reactions and the truth after incidents occur, Chang said.

The number of people who visited www.shaanxi.gov.cn hit about 34 million in 2010, a 25 percent increase from 2009.

"Top-ranked government websites like Beijing and Shaanxi share a great similarity, which is that they actually serve, help and interact with people. They have become service providers," the testing center's Zhang said. "I believe more Chinese government websites will join their league in the near future and people will be the best judges."

More cover stories