On October 12, the China National Convention Center in Beijing was filled with delegates from more than 70 countries and regions. They had not come for a multilateral event on trade or security, but for the 2026 Beijing Forum on Swift Response to Public Complaints, an event dedicated to the operation of a government service hotline—12345.

To a Beijing resident, the number needs no explanation: Dial it when the heat cuts out in winter, when a streetlight burns out, when the restaurant downstairs gets too loud. Small stuff. The kind of small stuff that, in most cities, disappears into a maze of departments and deadlines. In Beijing, it triggers a system built to answer—fast.

Since 2019, when the city consolidated its scattered government hotlines under 12345 and launched the "swift response to public complaints" initiative, the platform has handled roughly 200 million requests, with annual volume rising from 6.96 million in 2019 to more than 20 million in recent years. On a busy day, more than 70,000 calls come in. In the early years, barely half were resolved to callers' satisfaction. Last year, both the resolution rate and the satisfaction rate crossed 97 percent. Behind all these numbers are 750 seats and more than 1,700 operators working around the clock.

"People's everyday complaints aren't noise. They're the city's to-do list," Darren Smith, a fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences, said at the forum, themed The Digital Era and the People's City.

That sentence captures the logic Beijing has spent seven years building: Take the small stuff seriously, and the city starts to work differently.

Every call gets a countdown 

The 12345 mechanism sounds simple. A resident calls; the request is logged, categorized and assigned to the responsible department; a countdown begins. The substance lies in what happens next—the closing of the gap between "someone complained" and "someone showed up."

Consider Shahe Subway Station, on the northern edge of the city. Nearly 95,000 passengers transfer there every day, and at peak times some 10,000 bicycles and e-bikes used to clog the roads outside, leaving pedestrians to thread through handlebars. Complaints to 12345 piled up. The local government tried 11 versions of a fix—barriers, lanes, painted spaces—none of them stuck. Then came the decision to build upward. In March, a four-story, 4,500-square-meter parking structure was put into use. The blockade ended.

In the mountainous Baoshan Township in suburban Huairou District, the nearest village sits about 50 km from the township government seat—"two mountains away, just to buy a bag of salt," as residents put it. Following calls from villagers to 12345, the township coordinated an interdepartmental effort, dispatching mobile power stations, convenience stores and supermarkets to cover nearly 10,000 people in 25 villages.

Not every case is a construction project. In a courtyard in the downtown Shichahai area, unauthorized structures of some 70 square meters had drawn complaints for years, but piecemeal fixes never addressed the root cause. The Shichahai Subdistrict Office traced the problem through dozens of 12345 calls, canvassed residents more than 60 times and made four months of effort. By July, the buildings were gone.

These are not headline achievements. They are the texture of a city committed to putting its people first.

The initiative has also drawn growing international attention. Over the years, nearly 2,500 visitors from more than 120 countries and regions have visited the Beijing Government Service Center and the Beijing Citizen Hotline Service Center to see the mechanism up close.

What the scholars saw 

At a September 29 press conference, Beijing released two theoretical outputs from the reform. One was a collection of 21 papers; the other was an English-language monograph published by German multinational research publisher Springer, How Urban Governance Works? The Case of Swift Response to Public Complaints in Beijing. It is, the publisher said, the first time China has offered the world a governance solution drawn from its capital's practice—12 essays and four cases, with authors from Harvard University in the U.S., the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Renmin University of China, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

During the forum, many international participants shared their views on the hotline with Beijing Review. Omar Razzaz, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of Jordan, called 12345 "a model of efficient and balanced governance."

Bernadia Tjandradewi, Secretary General of the United Cities and Local Governments Asia-Pacific, described that approach as an exemplary model of grassroots governance that other cities worldwide could learn from.

Josef Gregory Mahoney, an American political scientist living in Shanghai, framed the phenomenon in terms of scale.

"I always like coming to Beijing, and I have been working with local broadcaster Beijing Radio and Television on projects related to 12345 for more than a few years now," Mahoney said. "It's good to come back and to join the discussions of those efforts, but it's also been a research interest of mine given my work in politics and international relations."

Mahoney was also quick to note that 12345 is not only a Beijing story. "Although we are focused here on 12345 in Beijing, and although Beijing has done an exceptional job in actualizing it, we also have 12345 almost everywhere in China. So we have a really good system in Shanghai," he noted. "That's one thing that I think an international audience should know: We have a great case study here, but we're also doing it really well in other places."

For Mahoney, the deeper significance is democratic in a particular sense. China, he argued, has long excelled at what he calls "big democracy"—really taking care of the interest of the overwhelming majority of the population, lifting some 800 million people out of poverty and steering national rejuvenation. "But now in the new era," he said, "the country is also really getting good at 'small democracy'—making sure that at the grassroots level, across cities nationwide, we're doing a much better job of taking care of people's needs. That's what people expect now that we've reached this new stage of development."

Mindy Romero, an assistant professor at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, the United States, sees the initiative less as a finished product than as a living system. "The hotline is about learning, evolving and always reforming," she told Beijing Review. "It's not static. And so that means that the government is learning from its people. It's evaluating and using big data. It's making sure people are satisfied."

Romero described 12345 as "a powerful, significant program that isn't known by everyone," and said the purpose of the gathering was "to help spread the word around the world."

Mujibur Rahman Khairul Muluk, an associate professor of public administration at Indonesia's Brawijaya University, drew the comparison closest to home. For Indonesia, a nation of more than 2,500 islands, he said a system for handling public complaints "is very important."

Beijing's response rate, he said, is amazing, adding, "We can learn very much from this hotline system."

At the forum, Shen Binhua, Deputy Secretary General of the Beijing Municipal Government and head of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Government Services and Data Management, said the city will advance the "swift response to public complaints" reform as part of broader efforts to translate the vision of a people-centered city into institutionalized, long-term and effective governance practice.

As a promotional video puts it, the question is never whether a hotline deserves an international forum; it is simpler, and harder: When a city's people call, does someone actually show up?

In Beijing, the answer now has a number. BR

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson. 

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