# Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality
## 3 E-Government in China
### Local E-Government Services Via SNS  
Under the guidance of the Internet Plus Strategy, local governments have started a new style of service delivery in recent years. It is well known that there are Chinese internet giants occupying social networking markets in the mainland--for example, \"WeChat\" from Tencent and \"Weibo\" from Sina. \"WeChat\" is a social medium encompassing instant messaging, e-payment, and blogging services, and is one of the most popular messaging applications. Reportedly, more than a third of the time spent by mainlands on the mobile Internet is spent on WeChat [41]. The latter, \"Weibo\", is a micro-blog social networking application similar to Twitter. They maintain an incredibly high usage rate among all population groups in Chinese mainland society. According to QuestMobile's report, active users of WeChat and SinaWeibo were approximately 800 million and 400 million respectively, ranked first and fourth of Chinese mobile apps at the end of 2016 [42]. Both private corporations have taken a huge step forward toward collaboration with local governments entering the realm of public services. Social networking utilization in governmental activities is akin to Twitter in that Weibo allows public departments to create official accounts (Figure 1a)to publish information to citizens directly including government news, announcements, mayors' mailboxes, local issues, online polls, and legislative consultations. It roughly corresponds to established e-government service items in e-information, e-consultation, e-discussion and e-decision-making [43]. Departments can gather public opinion and interact with citizens directly via the Weibo platform. The challenging and glamorous part of official Weibo accounts is that these accounts can be operated by a variety of departments such as e-government portals, public affairs, environmental agencies, and public security, meaning that the accounts are managed under different authorities, governed by different rules and responsibilities [43]. As the most powerful mobile social networking application in China, WeChat has gained the largest user groups and continues to expand its service layers. A video from the New York Times in August 2016 was titled \"How China is changing your internet?\" In the video, WeChat is introduced vividly, along with an explanation of its popularity in Chinese society:  
_\"WeChat is an example of, for lack of a better word, a super-app. It's a Swiss Army life that basically does everything for you, it's your WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype, Uber, Amazon, Instagram, Venmo and Tinder. But it's other things we don't even have apps for. There are hospitals that have built out whole appointment booking systems, investment services, there are even heat maps that show how crowded a place is, be it your favorite shopping mall or a popular tourist site. The list of services goes on basically forever. But it's not the variety of things you can do on WeChat that makes it so powerful, it's the fact that they're all in one app...\"_[44]. Since WeChat added public services to its platform in late 2014, its users have experienced unprecedented convenience in their daily life. Unlike Weibo, WeChat has combined government e-services fully with its existing platform functions from messaging to payment [45]. Until the first half of 2017, there were mainly two ways to activate public e-services on WeChat: a unified city service platform providing dozens of public services in cities; a mass of government official accounts in which citizens can check information and enjoy one-stop-service from different departments. As shown in Figure 1b,c, city service platforms can be easily accessed by pushing one button on WeChat interface. Citizens can pay utility bills/penalties, apply for administrative procedures such as visa and licenses, make medical appointments, check weather and transportation information, etc.