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When a city's population reaches over 20 million, can traditional administrative service models - emails, phone calls, and case-by-case reporting - still function effectively? Liu Gang, chair professor at Peking University, had lived in Denmark and Norway, but is now living and working in Beijing. Drawing on his personal experience in 2022, when he dialed 12345 to resolve an ID card recognition issue for his child who was born abroad, he compares the striking differences between Beijing and Nordic cities in terms of population size, administrative efficiency, and digital governance. He acknowledges that in small cities of around 200,000 people, the traditional approach – writing emails, reporting cases one by one, and waiting for callbacks – can still work. But faced with Beijing's population of over 20 million, such a model is almost unimaginable, making digital urban governance platforms an inevitable choice.

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