# Towards a New Digital Era: Observing Local E-Government Services Adoption in a Chinese Municipality
## Literature Review
### The Determinants of Adoption: Awareness, Intention to Use, Satisfaction and Demographic Impacts  
Either in the theoretical or practical field of e-government, awareness, intention to use and satisfaction of citizens regarding e-services are the crucial factors for evaluating success of projects. Due to the intersections among these factors and their impact on the e-services delivery overall, researchers have variously focused on individual factors as well as their correlations. Awareness refers to the extent to which citizens are aware of the introduction of e-government technology [19]. No matter how well designed and accessible a website is, people will not use the e-channel route to the delivery of the service if they do not know it exists [20; 21]. Awareness has also been identified as the key concern for governments in the first stage--the market penetration stage--in launching e-government technology [22]. In addition to its fundamental sense, scholars have verified the impact of awareness on citizens' attitudes towards e-service [23] via empirical research and analysis. Raising the rate of adoption of e-Services is the top-drawer objective on which governments' e-government efforts are focused. Previous research on the e-citizen project in the UK noted that the lack of awareness is currently holding back usage in some local areas [20]. The most common reasons cited for not making use of e-government included lack of awareness. The lack of awareness of the range of possibilities Internet and e-government services offer was reported to be a factor in why individuals are not motivated or interested in learning how to use the Internet [24; 25]. In the Chinese context, research has suggested that awareness of the existence of e-government will lead to an increase in citizens seeking and using e-government in China, which will result in an increasing benefit from e-government [26]. To figure out how citizens adopt, accept, and react to e-services, e-government researchers have assimilated user acceptance models from information system theories that have increasingly dominated e-service research [27]. Among acceptance theories, the Technology Acceptance Model is the most frequently used [4]. It was first proposed by [PERSON] in 1985 to predict how users will react to a new technology. In the model of technology acceptance theory, behavior intention to use (BI) and actual behavior usage (AI) are marked as two important indicators refer to individuals' intention to use the new system and their actual adoption of the system. In the TAM, the intention to use is believed to have direct influence on actual system use. After that, many replications and extensions have been made based on the original TAM model including TAM2 [28], in which intention to use continues to show its importance in adoption path. Researches have utilized the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as well [5]. It is a unified model that brings together alternative views on users and innovation acceptance developed by [PERSON] et al. in 2003. In UTAUT, in addition to the intention to use, demographic factors such as gender, age and experience appear to influence the usage of individuals. From the literature discussing demographic impacts, empirical evidence from diverse nations has opposite results: for instance, some have found that men have more awareness and adoption than women [29], while others have found that females scored higher than males in social media adoption [30]. The same situation was observed regarding relationships between age, education and IT experience which will be discussed in Section 5. By all accounts, UTAUT is one of the latest efforts in the field of technology acceptance models. As with earlier acceptance and adoption models, it seeks to explain user intentions to use information systems and further their usage behaviors. The TAM and UTAUT models have proven their applicability in the e-government area via many empirical studies that justify their accuracy.