What can Beijing's wisdom in urban governance offer to the world?

Editor's note: Yan Yu, a special commentator for CGTN, is a lecturer at the School of Government at Beijing Normal University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

As cities around the world embrace artificial intelligence, big data and digital platforms, the idea of the "smart city" is often associated with sensors, algorithms and connected infrastructure. Yet a more fundamental question deserves equal attention: How can a city actually hear its people and turn their everyday concerns into effective government action?

This question will be especially relevant when this year's Beijing Forum on Swift Response to Public Complaints convenes in Beijing on October 12 and 13 under the theme "Digital Intelligence Era and People's City." Beijing's experience suggests that the future of smart urban governance depends as much on institutions and collaboration as on technology.

Beijing's 12345 citizen service hotline represents an important experiment in making government more accessible and responsive. It allows residents to report problems, seek public services and communicate directly with the municipal government. The city has expanded these services through websites, mobile applications and other digital channels.   

But digital access alone cannot make a city responsive. Our comparative research on Beijing and New York City helps explain the institutional arrangements behind this responsiveness. The two cities have developed different forms of internal government collaboration.

New York follows a horizontal mode of collaboration, with technology-oriented leadership, a relatively fragmented institutional framework and contractual cooperation among city agencies. NYC311 has been especially strong in technological development and accessibility. Its customer relationship management systems, mobile applications, open interfaces and data tools allow residents to submit and track requests through multiple channels. Cooperation with municipal agencies is organized largely through Service Level Agreements, which establish response standards and expected time frames. Regular communication among agencies further supports coordination.

Beijing has built what we describe as a vertical mode of collaboration, characterized by administration-oriented leadership, a comprehensive institutional framework and cross-level cooperation. Its approach illustrates an important feature of urban governance: Citizen demands are connected directly to the administrative system and can mobilize coordination across organizational levels. Since the launch of the Swift Response to Public Complaints reform in 2019, Beijing has treated the 12345 hotline as more than a communication channel. Requests received through the hotline are assigned to responsible agencies and local governments, while performance in responding to residents is incorporated into government evaluation.

The Regulations of Beijing Municipality on Swift Response to Public Complaints promulgated and implemented in 2021 further institutionalized the process, covering the reception, classification, assignment, handling and feedback of citizen requests, together with evaluation and accountability arrangements.

This institutionalization matters because many urban problems do not fit neatly within the boundaries of a single agency. A complaint about a neighborhood environment, a public facility or a local service may involve several departments and different levels of government. Beijing's cross-level coordination mechanism enables grassroots governments to request assistance from higher-level authorities when a problem exceeds their own jurisdiction or capacity. Relevant agencies are then required to participate in resolving the issue. The result is an organizational mechanism that connects local knowledge with resources and authority located at different levels of governments.

Beijing offers a broader lesson for urban governance in the digital age. Technology can help governments sense social needs, process information and connect citizens with public agencies. But the ability to transform information into action depends on how authority, responsibility and resources are organized inside government.

This is where Beijing's experience adds a distinctive perspective to the global discussion on smart cities. Its practice demonstrates how digital platforms can be embedded within administrative reform, legal rules, performance evaluation and cross-level coordination. Citizen input consequently becomes part of the routine operation of urban government rather than remaining simply a stream of data collected by a digital platform.

For cities searching for ways to govern increasingly complex societies, there is no single institutional model that can simply be transplanted across political and administrative contexts. The more transferable insight is the importance of aligning technology with governance. Smart technologies can expand the capacity to sense the city, while institutions determine whether and how governments respond to what they sense.

Beijing's practice ultimately points to a broader question for the digital-intelligent era: What makes a city truly smart? The answer may lie less in the sophistication of its technologies than in whether those technologies help governments understand people's needs and translate them into meaningful action. A people-centered city, in this sense, is one in which digital intelligence is ultimately measured by its capacity to make urban governance more responsive to citizens' everyday lives.

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