Editor's note: Liu Lun, a special commentator for CGTN, is an associate professor at the School of Government, Peking University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Governing a megacity means confronting a paradox – the problems are infinite in variety, while bureaucratic responsibility is finite and fragmented. A leaking pipe may require the services of the water utility, the property manager and the sub-district office for its resolution, and the residents suffering from the problem may not know, or care, which agency is in charge.

Since 2019, Beijing's answer to this paradox has been the reform of its 12345 citizen service hotline, known as Jiesu jiban – "Swift Response to Public Complaints." Over the past seven-plus years, the hotline has handled roughly 180 million requests, with both resolution and satisfaction rates now above 97%, up from 53.1% and 64.6% respectively before the reform. This is more than a service upgrade, it is a demonstration of how digital intelligence can empower megacity governance, and become a reference point for cities worldwide.

Digital intelligence works best when citizens feel it least. The reform folds offline complaint channels into a single one-stop digital platform, yet using it demands no digital skill at all. One phone call suffices, and no internet access is required.

The data confirms that this low-tech front door is precisely what citizens choose. Of the 25.8 million requests received in 2025, 89% came by telephone. Contrast this with London, where the Westminster Council's "Report it" service is a web portal that asks citizens to pick the right issue category themselves. The civic platform FixMyStreet requires users to locate the problem on a map and classify it before a report can even be routed.

Beijing's residents don’t have to decode the government's organization chart because AI-powered dispatch does the classifying for them. The interface feels maximally simple precisely because the technology behind it is sophisticated.

Digital intelligence has re-engineered the work behind the phone line. An intelligent agent assistance system transcribes calls in real time, acquires names, addresses and key facts during the conversation, and generates a structured service ticket with one click, while recommending relevant knowledge base entries during inquiry calls.

On the digital-intelligence platform serving the reform, the full cycle from answering a call to submitting a finished ticket can take as little as one minute, with intelligent dispatch reaching 95% accuracy. Across the city, operators complete dispatching in an average of 3.7 minutes through a standardized five-level dispatch catalog.

A more profound achievement lies in the scheduling algorithm itself. Through machine learning, it has mastered the intricate division of labor across dozens of departments and hundreds of street-level jurisdictions – knowledge that previously required veteran dispatchers years to fully grasp.

A digital platform that coordinates government departments. China's urban administration traditionally suffers from fragmentation. The 12345 platform has turned itself into cross-departmental coordination infrastructure. Every ticket has a designated lead agency, deadlines and a satisfaction callback. The "streets blow the whistle, departments report" mechanism lets grassroots offices summon city agencies to the scene.

For instance, when residents of a neighborhood complained of foul odors, the township used this mechanism to convene environmental regulators on-site, install 24-hour monitoring equipment and press the responsible company to remediate. The silos now operate on a shared digital spine where coordination is the default rather than the exception.

Big data converts today's complaints into tomorrow's foresight. Rather than treating each call as an isolated case, Beijing mines this trove of livelihood data – 180 million requests alongside millions of enterprise records and over 7,000 community data points – to detect patterns and then acts before complaints recur.

Since 2021, the "Monthly Topic" practice has targeted more than 70 high-frequency, citywide problems, completing over 2,000 tasks and yielding more than 500 new policies. Weisu xianban – "Proactive governance before complaints arise" – is now routine. Heating systems are repaired in summer before winter failures, and maps of flood-prone underpasses are published before the rainy season. The entire model of urban governance has shifted from reactive firefighting to data-driven anticipation.

The lesson from Beijing's 12345 is that the core value of digital intelligence lies not in the technology itself, but in what it serves. On the citizen side, it responds to livelihood concerns with warmth, meeting people where they are on an ordinary phone line and holding itself accountable to their satisfaction as the ultimate yardstick.

On the government side, it converts technology into efficacy, faster answers, smarter coordination and policy that learns from data. For the world's megacities wrestling with complex and diverse demands, that combination of computational power and human orientation may be the most exportable experience of all.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com. Follow @thouse_opinions on X to discover the latest commentaries in the CGTN Opinion Section.)