The Techno-cadre’s Dream

Abstract

In this article the views and agenda of China’s techno-cadres, that is, the top-level advisors planning and implementing e-government projects, are scrutinized. Their goals for Chinese e-government not only focus on electronic service delivery to business—the ambition is to make the authoritarian governing process less opaque to citizens. Just as the former Premier Zhu Rongji used the WTO agreement to push overall reform, reform-minded techno-cadres utilize the expansion of e-government to further promote zaizao, that is, the restructuring to a more effective bureaucracy and a more transparent governance process. Nevertheless, China’s electronic government projects at various levels are still driven by a top-down approach and consequently electronic services are not helping Chinese people to hold government accountable. In the short run, the government seems more likely to be a winner than the Chinese population in the introduction of e-government projects. The documents analyzed in this article show that there are limits that even the techno-cadres do not wish to, and cannot, transcend.