Filing taxes online, at first glance a mere convenience for citizens, is an example of an e-government initiative in China that has much larger potential implications.

China launched its Government Online Project in 1999 and since then more than 10,000 government-related websites have been published on the Internet.

Apart from modernizing the management of government affairs, e-government may also help promote the transparency of government work--even reducing malpractices such as abuse of power by tax officers.

The face-to-face mode of filing taxes leaves open the possibility of some officers committing fraud for personal gain. With online filing, a service recently launched by Beijing’s taxation bureau, citizens are on a more equal footing. It also helps simplify the tax-paying process.

“In the past, in order to pay taxes, we had to visit relevant government agencies again and again because of the complicated procedures involved. Nowadays, all the work can be done without leaving my office,” said Zhou Xiaolin, who runs a private company in Beijing.

However, Zhou is among the minority of people using government services in this way. Although the concept of e-government, which refers to government services offered online, has existed for at least seven years in China, the number of users remains small.

An Internet survey conducted in 2005 shows that e-government contributed to only 2 percent of frequently used online government services. The 2-percent share seems far away from the government’s ultimate goal of making government-citizen and government-enterprise interactions as well as inter-agency relationships more convenient, transparent and inexpensive.

What, then, is preventing e-government from reaching more people?

According to Economic Information Daily, a Beijing-based newspaper, over 40,000 government websites in China can be found through online searching. Some 90 percent of the main pages of these websites, selected at random, present the latest news, but most of the important data and information on the sites are completely outdated.

Some of them haven’t been updated for years, while others have nicely designed main pages but no further content, despite the fact that the construction of a single government website can cost hundreds of thousands of yuan.

“Government website? No attention to it for quite a while. People who want to learn about government information may come directly to our offices,” said an employee at the Yancheng Food Bureau of Henan Province, when asked about the availability of online information regarding the supply and demand of agricultural produce.