As big data and digitalization gained momentum in recent years, digital government construction has accelerated nationwide, with many regions rushing to build "city brains" or "smart cities" as beneficial attempts to enhance government efficiency and public services.

However, some local governments have invested tens of millions of yuan in digital projects, only to end up in the awkward situation of "completed but idle, operational but hollow."

Recently, digital projects in Qujing, Yunnan, were exposed as having stalled or been shut down. Money was spent, projects were built, but why aren't they being used? What exactly led to the failure of these projects? Reporters launched an investigation.

Reporters recently visited the "Digital Qujing Operations Center" in an industrial park in Qujing City, Yunnan, which once housed projects like the Qujing "City Brain" and the Qujing Tong app. Now the place is deserted, with empty offices indicating no one has worked here for a long time.

The offices were cleared, and the Qujing Tong app developed by the company has also vanished. Qujing Tong is a city-level government service app. During random street interviews in Qujing, most citizens knew little about it. The few who had used it said that apart from registering children for primary school, the app was almost useless in daily life.

Reporters then went to the Qujing Data Bureau to learn more. Wang Kun, Director of the Qujing Data Bureau in Yunnan, stated that as of the end of 2025, the Qujing Tong app had only around 60 daily active users. Qujing has a permanent population of over 5.5 million, so why does its app have just 60 daily actives?

Qujing Tong was launched in 2021. Out of more than seventy applications, only six were self-built; the rest were links to other apps, completely duplicating existing functions, many of which came from Yunnan Province's "One Phone for Everything" platform. Yunnan had launched this provincial app back in 2019, covering governments at provincial, municipal, county, and township levels. In Qujing, it has about 1.9 million registered users and roughly 21.54 million transactions.

The provincial app was built earlier, offers fuller features, and is preferred by residents, eliminating the need for local investment. With a provincial platform in place, the local government app was inherently redundant construction, and with residents disinterested, it naturally lost vitality.

So why did Qujing undertake this duplicate construction? Reports indicate that Qujing Tong was just a small part of Qujing's "City Brain" project. In 2021, driven by the then top Qujing municipal leader, the city brought in an external enterprise through bidding to invest and restructure the Qujing Digital Economy Company. The government then co-built the "City Brain" by purchasing services. What was the original intention behind building this "City Brain"?

Wu Yihua, Member of the Standing Committee and Vice Mayor of Qujing, noted that they saw the significant results Hangzhou's "City Brain" brought to urban governance. "Everyone saw its benefits, but we didn't recognize the gap in our own capabilities. When we lacked the ability ourselves, we believed outsiders might have it. I think there was a weakness here, a problem of scientific decision-making."

Because local technical expertise was insufficient, both the technical feasibility review and project design were handed over to the external company. The company proposed a comprehensive "City Brain" plan, including a database and data capability center, a display center called the "Digital Cockpit," and two application platforms: "Qujing Tong" and "Unified Network Management."

The most visually striking part was the "Digital Cockpit." Wang Kun described it as akin to a car's dashboard, integrating various data for display on a screen over ten meters long. The big display screen was built, but in reality, the local government had little clarity on how the "City Brain" should actually be developed. The contract between the government and the operating company only vaguely specified requirements like "operations management, data governance, and system maintenance services."

After the "City Brain" was completed, local authorities discovered that not only was Qujing Tong unused, but the "Unified Network Management" platform also fell flat. This platform was intended to cover more than ten fields, including urban operations management, environmental protection, comprehensive governance, emergency management, and health education, aiming to "solve complex cross-departmental and cross-hierarchy problems with digitalization," but most of this work remained on the display level.

The project's performance fell short of expectations, yet according to the contract, after acceptance, the government was to pay annual operation service fees based on annual assessments, capped at 10 million yuan per year. Wang Kun said they paid 9.9 million yuan annually in 2022, 2023, and 2024, totaling three years of payments for the entire "City Brain" project.

If the operation results were so far from expectations, how did the initial acceptance pass? And why were nearly 30 million yuan in operating fees paid for three consecutive years? The project's acceptance materials for each of the three years consist of thick binders totaling over a thousand pages. For 2024, the expert panel was formed at 15:20 on November 4, and acceptance was completed by 17:20—just 120 minutes. Experts had to review more than ten pages per minute, and these materials were highly technical.

Reporters discovered that the acceptance experts came from diverse backgrounds, including a city compulsory drug rehabilitation center, a district court, an agricultural school, and a hospital—clearly not data industry specialists. How was such a rapid acceptance carried out? The head of the Digital Government Section of the Qujing Data Bureau, who participated in the acceptance meeting, said their method was mainly to check whether the items listed in the plan had been built; if so, the experts passed them.

However, being built does not mean being used. The contract stipulated that new application projects must be added each year. In the 2024 acceptance materials, a new "Data Element Operations Platform" project was added. Was it put into use? Zhao Guoliang, Section Chief of the Digital Government Section, admitted that no data transactions were realized. "The original expectation was for it to explore data elements, value demonstration, and operations as a long-term effort, but it truly failed to play its intended role."

In 2025, the Qujing Municipal Party Committee's inspection team found that the "City Brain" project posed a risk of wasting fiscal funds. The Qujing Data Bureau and the Digital Economy Company discussed how to improve the project's functions but failed to reach an agreement. Staff from the Qujing Data Bureau said that during the rectification process, the partner felt the funds were insufficient to continue further improvements. With the platform underperforming and to save fiscal resources, the decision was ultimately made to shut it down.

The head of the Qujing Digital Economy Company argued that software needs constant updates and iterative optimization to improve, and without funding, the company couldn't sustain operations and had to withdraw. Starting in 2025, the Qujing government decided to stop paying operation fees, and the Data Bureau signed a contract termination agreement with Qujing Digital Company, ending the "City Brain" project. In March 2026, Qujing Tong was fully removed from all mobile app stores, permanently terminating all services.

Meng Qingguo, Executive Dean of the National Governance Research Institute at Tsinghua University, commented that some places blindly pursue new concepts and flashy, "high-end" projects. "This pursuit detaches from reality and public needs. What looks good on the surface is hard to build and even harder to function effectively."

In fact, the losses from Qujing's "City Brain" go beyond wasted fiscal funds; state-owned enterprises in Qujing and its counties were also involved. In 2021, to facilitate the project, 11 local state-owned platform companies contributed 17 million yuan under the guidance of the municipal party committee and government, holding nearly 40% of shares in the Qujing Digital Economy Company. After the project failed, the company suffered sustained losses, leaving these platform companies as investors feeling extremely helpless.

In total, the Qujing "City Brain" project saw the municipal finance invest 29.7 million yuan, and local state-owned enterprises contribute 17 million yuan, for a combined local investment of 46.7 million yuan. With the project's termination, these investments clearly failed to deliver their intended value.

Local platform company and data bureau leaders reflected on this "impulsive investment." Xie Xianzhi, Project Manager at Qujing Industrial Investment Company, acknowledged that for enterprises in prefecture-level cities like Qujing, there's a lack of professional data talent. "Our capabilities are insufficient. In future investments, we will gradually exit projects where we lack professional expertise or that fall outside our core business."

Wang Kun said, "This matter, in my personal view, is representative. We can no longer focus only on construction while ignoring actual user needs. We should focus more on meeting strong demands—not just strong livelihood needs, but also market economy demands. We can't just act recklessly."

Qujing's experience with digital projects offers a profound lesson. To better promote integrated e-government development, since 2022, the General Office of the State Council has issued documents such as the "National Integrated Government Big Data System Construction Guide" and the "Government Data Sharing Regulations." In January 2026, the "Regulatory Measures for the Standardized Management of Government Mobile Internet Applications" were also introduced, requiring the closure and cancellation of government apps with low usage and poor practicality, and clarifying that units below the county level should generally not develop government applications. All regions should unify data standards and build shared systems to eliminate redundant construction at the source.

Qujing's "City Brain" has bought a painful lesson at a cost of tens of millions: digitalization is not the goal but a means. What matters is that the public finds it useful and usable—that is the true purpose of digital government. Only by staying realistic, starting from actual needs and capabilities, can our e-government and smart city initiatives avoid repeating the mistake of "building without using, using without effect," ensuring every penny of fiscal investment is spent wisely. Digitalization should become a tool to improve governance efficiency and facilitate public services, not a "digital bonsai" for window dressing. This also serves as a "golden benchmark" for testing the establishment and practice of a correct view of political achievements.