IfG.CC - The Institute for eGovernment

Korea's Vice Minister of Government Administration and Home Affairs Choi Yang-sik met with his Chinese counterpart Chen Dawei in Beijing. The two agreed to actively share information and knowledge, including exchanging public sector human resources and tapping into private sector know-how of systems development.

At least two days every week, Zhang Shiqing walks along the shores of the Queen's Bay in Sanya, a tourist hotspot in south China's Hainan Province, to collect garbage from the beach. "It takes at least three hours to make the six-kilometer trip down and back," she said.

Queen's Bay is located near Tenghai Community, also known as Houhai. It is a favorite tourist destination and a pilot community for building Sanya into a "plastic smart city." As the women's affairs director of the Tenghai Community Committee, Zhang has actively participated in the community's regular activities to remove garbage from the beach and reduce plastic pollutants. On November 21, 2021, Sanya organized a fourth quarter beach cleaning as part of its "Plastic Smart Cities" demonstration project. Within one hour, 314.4 kilograms of garbage were removed including 210 kilograms of plastic waste, accounting for 70 percent of all the garbage.

A new city near Beijing featuring wooden apartment blocks, rooftop farms and renewable energy is being designed with drone-friendly terraces and ample space from which to work at home in case of future pandemic outbreaks, its chief architect said.

Barcelona-based Guallart Architects last month won a contest to design a community in Xiong’an, a new city promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping as “a new standard in the post-Covid era” that can also be applied elsewhere.

About 84 percent of the Chinese people can accept going out without any cash, according to a report of mobile payment usage in China released by Chinese mobile payment solution Wechat Pay.

The report 2017 Mobile Payment Usage in China was released Friday during the 3rd Asia-Pacific Regional Forums on Smart Cities and e-Government which was held in the north suburb of Bangkok.

With such a standard platform, the organs of the Party, National People's Congress, government, Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, court and procuratorate will have their own websites or sub-network linked together, said Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan at the opening ceremony.

Chinese scientists have established the world’s first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4,600 kilometers for users across the country. The team, led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported in Nature their latest advances towards the global, practical application of such a network for future communications.

Unlike conventional encryption, quantum communication is considered unhackable and therefore the future of secure information transfer for banks, power grids and other sectors. The core of quantum communication is quantum key distribution (QKD), which uses the quantum states of particles — e.g. photons — to form a string of zeros and ones, while any eavesdropping between the sender and the receiver will change this string or key and be noticed immediately. So far, the most common QKD technology uses optical fibers for transmissions over several hundred kilometers, with high stability but considerable channel loss. Another major QKD technology uses the free space between satellites and ground stations for thousand-kilometer-level transmissions. In 2016, China launched the world’s first quantum communication satellite (QUESS, or Mozi/Micius) and achieved QKD with two ground stations which are 2,600 km apart. In 2017, an over 2,000-km-long optical fiber network was completed for QKD between Beijing and Shanghai.

The University of Macao (UM) on Friday, October 23rd, initiated an Autonomous Driving Bus Testing Platform, making it the campus's first functioning autonomous driving bus but is still on a trail run.

UM Rector Song Yonghua , stated in the midst of the launching celebration that intelligent transport systems are the future of the automotive sector, and countries all over the world are competing on who will develop better technologies in the field faster.

The new regulations, known as the Internet Information Service Algorithmic Recommendation Management Provisions, have been drafted by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the body that enforces cybersecurity, internet censorship, and e-commerce rules. Terming the new rules as regulations for deep synthesis technology, GAC is implementing them to protect people’s legitimate rights and interests. These significant policies are being implemented to ensure more effective services (e.g., ride-hailing, social media) for the country’s over 1.4 billion people and manage tech companies and services providers.

Artificial Intelligence issues are of concern to China. President Xi Jinping alluded to such challenges in his speech last October, “Some unhealthy and disorderly signals and trends have occurred in the rapid development of our country’s digital economy.”

China is planning police stations that are completely unmanned, using face recognition to identify visiting citizens.

According to financial paper Caijing Neican, the futuristic station will offer simulated driver examinations and provide registration services.

China ranked 34th among 193 countries around the world in terms of availability of online services in e-government development, according to a United Nations survey.

The Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs on Friday jointly issued the Chinese version of the United Nations E-Government Survey 2018 report.

China launched an artificial intelligence open-source platform Saturday to jointly promote the global development of the booming industry.

The Dubhe platform was set up in October 2018, with nearly 100 researchers participating in the project. It aims to become an industry leader by forging an artificial intelligence cooperation ecosystem and facilitating the advancement of the industry.

Dozens of Chinese firms have built software that uses artificial intelligence to sort data collected on residents, amid high demand from authorities seeking to upgrade their surveillance tools, a Reuters review of government documents shows.

According to more than 50 publicly available documents examined by Reuters, dozens of entities in China have over the past four years bought such software, known as “one person, one file”. The technology improves on existing software, which simply collects data but leaves it to people to organize.

China's national supercomputing framework will pull together computing resources across the country to drive the development of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

China is looking to establish a national supercomputing framework to drive its digital plans and the development of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI).

KEY POINTS

• Analysts predict that China's Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will be the first to launch in the world
• China's speed in deploying projects at a national level should not be understated
• When CBDC launches, China can incentivize partners to use it

China’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) could be the first such currency to launch internationally, bypassing the U.S. dollar.

Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, on Sunday piloted the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) on the AI-powered City Brain platform for the city's Xiacheng District, in a bid to improve its e-government services.

Co-launched by the State Information Center, China Unionpay and China Mobile, the BSN is a nationwide infrastructure platform of blockchain-based service that crosses the public network, as well as multiple regions and organizations.

Beijing is convinced that innovation technology and infrastructure development hold the key to 'national rejuvenation'

As the world confronts the profound social, economic and political challenges that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19, Beijing has unleashed digital innovations that hold profound implications for the future of international trade, global governance, and geopolitics.

On April 25, in the midst of battling the pandemic, China’s government established the world’s largest blockchain ecosystem, the Blockchain Service Network (BSN), and its central bank introduced “digital yuan” pilot programs across four cities – making the People’s Republic the world’s first major economy to issue a national digital currency.

Last October, China’s central bank implemented the mandatory use of business QR Codes for all merchants starting March 1 QR Codes — in effect phasing out personal QR Codes which accounts for the majority of China’s total mobile payments.

But the new rules saw strong resistance as business versions meant filing paperwork and paying higher fees. In order to assess the feedback, China’s Payment and Clearing Association announced merchants can still entertain personal QR codes for business transactions.

While COVID-19 is a substantial policy problem unto itself, it will also have many knock-on impacts, including on smart city projects, Kris Hartley writes.

COVID-19 has arrested the world’s attention, and for good reason. However, policy challenges that were urgent before the crisis, if anyone can remember them, have not gone away. Climate change, socio-economic inequality, rapid urbanisation, and digital transformation, among other issues, remain salient around the world.

All digital business in China will need to consider the implications brought by the draft Measures for Security Assessment of Export of Personal Information and Critical Data (“Draft”) which were presented by the Cyberspace Administration of China (“CAC”) to solicit comments from the public until 11 May 2017 and are expected to take effect in June 2017. This is an important legislative move following the new PRC Cyber Security Law, which will take effect on 1 June 2017 (“CS Law”), and which extends the legal application of the controversial Article 37 under the CS Law. This article generally imposes a local storage obligation on critical information infrastructure operators (“CIIO”) with regard to personal information and important data collected and generated out of their operation in China. If transmission of such data out of China is necessary due to business needs, clearance procedures shall be followed according to separate rules to be formulated by the CAC. The Draft is meant to clarify details for further implementation of Article 37 of the CS Law. However, in its current form as presented to the public it appears to go far beyond the CS Law, which will have a substantial impact on all online based business including digital business.