简体中文
Beijing's Haidian District has been leading the city's efforts to digitize public affairs. Now given the novel coronavirus epidemic, the process has sped up.
The district's government has improved the function of its official app, also increasing its use of blockchain.
Art gallery owner Tang Changjiang is one of the first beneficiary.
Tang said that traditionally art galleries ask a third party agency to apply for business licenses. This means extra cost and time. But this time around, he applied on the district government's app and received his license in just two days.
Haidian District is famous for an IT industry park, Zhongguancun, known as China's Silicon Valley, where tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent are stationed.
This has given the district government an edge in applying the latest cybersecurity tools to its online affairs, using, for example, blockchain.
Blockchain was widely used in corporate finance to trace transactions, but now government departments are also using the technology to verify information.
Take Tang's art gallery license for example. His personal information and the company's registration ID are automatically recognized as authentic by a certain blockchain formed by the Ministry of Commerce, the service center and other government entities the case may concern.
Chen Lei, head of the IT office at Haidian's administrative service center, said that people used to run between different government organs to get certificates to prove the authenticity of their application materials. But with the blockchain technology, the center can collect necessary information directly from the database and save applicants a lot of legwork.
The digitization of government affairs not only improves efficiency, but also alleviate the pressure of crowd control at government buildings.
Wang Xi, head of the management team at Haidian's administrative service center, says the center used to receive nearly 3,000 people a day. Now, this number has fallen to 600 because many have chosen to handle their personal or corporate affairs online.
So far, the 16 administrative districts in Beijing allow 97 percent of their public services to be conducted online.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
