Editor's note: Ma Liang is a professor at the School of Government at Peking University. The article reflects the author's opinion and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Government hotlines in China have become an efficient channel for citizens and businesses to access public services, serving as a direct interface between the public and the state. Residents use them to report everyday issues such as broken streetlights or neighborhood noise, while businesses consult them on procedures like applying for subsidies.

This mechanism has gained particular significance in China, where rapid urbanization over the past decades – one of the largest in human history – has given rise to megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Hosting tens of millions of residents, these cities face unprecedented challenges in meeting increasingly diverse public service demands. In response, a governance model centered on the 12345 hotline has emerged as a key tool to streamline state–citizen interactions, with different cities developing innovative approaches that offer valuable lessons for other developing urban centers.

Beijing's "Swift Responses to Public Complaints"(Jiesu Jiban) was initiated in 2019, and it soon became the commanding heights in government steering and policy implementation. For instance, the hotline in Beijing has handled a total of 24.195 million reports from citizens and businesses in 2024, with a resolution rate and satisfaction rate of 96.7% and 97.0%, respectively.

Similarly, Shenzhen develops the "Quick Action on Public Opinions"(Minyi Suban) platform, and artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies are used to identify and respond to residents' complaints and suggestions. An enthusiastic resident uses a tape measure to help government identify loopholes, and rectifications often happen the next day, showing what the Shenzhen speed means.

Shanghai leads in "One-Stop Management Platform"(Yiwang Tongguan), and online citizen participation is incorporated into the whole process of urban governance. Also, Guangzhou created "We Respond to the People's Calls"(Minhu Woying), and government agencies and grassroots organizations proactively respond to citizens' calls.

The hotline service center was firstly introduced by Chinese cities in 1980s by the name of the Mayor's Hotline, and is not something new. It is only until the 2010s when various public service hotlines integrated into one phone number, 12345. The hotline was then incorporated and prioritized into the urban governance system, and its magic power has been amplified by rapid digital transformation.

While these megacities differ in their approaches to the immediate response to public complaints system, they share underlying values, performance metrics, and policy instruments, making a new China model for urban governance.

A citizen-centric governance instrument, government hotline vividly shows how a city is built by the people and for the people. The hotline is an intermediary facilitating mutual interactions between citizens and government, and both sides benefit from such communications. The hotline is practicing the whole-process people's democracy, making it an effective channel for citizens to participate and deliberate in political and administrative processes. For instance, citizens not only complain about problems with urban governance, but also provide ideas and suggestions to improve public services. Also, citizen participation largely reduces governance costs, and helps government to recognize blind spots in policy implementation.

The hotline relies on key performance metrics such as the number of public complaints received, response rates, resolution rates and satisfaction rates to build a correct attitude towards performance in local cadres' daily work. Different from traditional government performance measurement relying on official statistics like GDP growth rate, these metrics are more people-centric and substantive. People can directly sense and personally benefit from the improvements in these metrics, and they are mobilized to participate in the processes. Meanwhile, these metrics help to encourage local cadres to prioritize citizens' concerns and perceptions in their policy agenda-setting and resources allocation, and the level of citizen satisfaction with urban services increases accordingly.

The dashboard of the hotline is an informative barometer precisely visualizing urban dynamics in every aspect, and local cadres use it to check the problems and monitor the progresses. These metrics not only hold local cadres accountable to citizens' assessments, but also direct government resources allocation and policy improvements.

The ranking and rating system helps to incentivize local governments to pay close attention to citizens' complaints and to what extent they are addressed. The metrics are updated daily, weekly and monthly, and those in the bottom are under strong pressure to quickly learn from and catch up with exemplars. As long as performance metrics are linked with cadre incentives and accountability, citizen demands are prioritized in government attention.

The benchmarking and learning system is used to identify the best practices in creatively alleviating residents' concerns, and soon they are modeled and diffused across localities. In other words, the system facilitates policy piloting, learning, and diffusion, which are core to continuous organizational development and performance improvement.

The hotline not only responds actively to citizen complaints by a case-by-case manner, but also takes a proactive approach to forecast and prevent emerging concerns. Big data analytics and AI are used to identify common patterns of citizen complaints across themes, localities, and time periods, and government uses smart city applications to efficiently position and address public concerns.

The hotline in Beijing, for instance, identifies high-frequency, common issue such as the shortage of electric bicycle charging facilities, and incorporated them into the "One Issue per Month" initiative for targeted resolution, thereby establishing an effective mechanism for institutionally identifying and systematically addressing policy problems.In comparison to responding to citizen concerns one by one, a systematic way through policy changes and legislations would remarkably upgrade urban governance in a larger scale.

Similarly, typhoon and other seasonal emergencies are modeled in advance to equip cadres and residents with knowledge and skills prepared for their agile responses. Also, complex policy problems involving cross-agency coordination are identified, and urban party-state leaders use the whole government approach to facilitate collaborative problem resolution.

Megacities are strong in financial resources, manpower, and technological capacities, but other small-and-medium-sized cities can also develop similar systems in leveraging the potential of responsive government. Also, cities in other countries can learn from their experiences, and that is why Beijing initiated the Forum on Swift Response to Public Complaints since 2024 to communicate its practices to peer cities in the world. We hope cities can utilize this and other opportunities to share best practices in urban governance, and to build better cities for residents.