In recent years, digital government initiatives have accelerated across China, with many localities striving to build "city brains" or "smart cities." Yet, some local governments have invested tens of millions of yuan into digital projects that have fallen into an awkward state of "built but idle, operational but inactive." Not long ago, several digital projects in Qujing, Yunnan, were exposed as having stalled or been shut down entirely. Money was spent, projects were built—so why aren't they being used? What are the real reasons behind these failures?

Tens of millions of yuan invested, the "city brain" became a shelved project. Not long ago, a reporter visited a "Digital Qujing Operations Center" inside an industrial park, a facility that once housed the Qujing "City Brain" and the Qujing Tong app. Now, the premises are deserted, with empty office spaces showing no signs of recent activity. The offices have been vacated, and the Qujing Tong app developed by the company has also vanished. Qujing Tong is a city government service app. Random interviews with citizens revealed that most have little knowledge of it. A few who have used it reported that, aside from registering children for primary school, the app serves virtually no purpose in daily life. Qujing has a permanent population of over 5.5 million, yet as of the end of 2025, the Qujing Tong app had only around 60 daily active users. Launched in 2021, the app has over 70 applications, but only six were self-built. The rest are merely links to other applications, duplicating their functions entirely, with many sourced from Yunnan Province's "One Phone for All Services" platform. As early as 2019, the Yunnan provincial government had launched the "One Phone for All Services" app, covering government services across provincial, city, county, and township levels. In Qujing, it has about 1.9 million registered users and has handled roughly 21.54 million transactions. The provincial app was built earlier, offers more comprehensive functions, and is more popular among residents, meaning local governments didn't need to invest further. So why did Qujing choose to build a redundant government app at the time?

The reporter learned that Qujing Tong was just a small part of the Qujing "City Brain" project. In 2021, driven by the then municipal party committee leadership, Qujing brought in an external company through bidding to invest and restructure the Qujing Digital Economy Company. The government then co-built the "City Brain" through a service procurement model. Wu Yihua, a member of the Standing Committee and Vice Mayor of Qujing, recalled that after seeing the positive impact of Hangzhou's "City Brain" on urban governance, "everyone saw its benefits, but not the gap in their own capabilities," leading to a flawed decision. Due to a lack of local technical expertise, the government handed over both the technical feasibility studies and the program design leadership to the outside company. That company proposed a comprehensive "City Brain plan," which included a "database and data capability center," an operational display center called a "Digital Cockpit," and two application platforms, "Qujing Tong" and "Unified Network Management." Among these, the most conspicuous was the "Digital Cockpit." Wang Kun, Director of the Qujing Data Bureau, explained that the Digital Cockpit is a display screen over ten meters long, akin to an automobile dashboard, integrating data for display. The large screen was installed, but in reality, the local government was unclear on how the "City Brain" should actually be built. Once the "City Brain" was completed, the authorities discovered that not only was Qujing Tong unused, but the "Unified Network Management" platform had also failed to meet expectations. This platform was intended to cover more than ten areas, including urban operations management, environmental protection, integrated governance, emergency management, and health and education, with the goal of "using digitalization to solve complex cross-departmental and cross-hierarchy problems," but most of these initiatives remained at the display level. The project's performance fell short of expectations. However, according to the contract, the government was to pay an annual operating service fee based on yearly assessment results, capped at 10 million yuan per year. The "City Brain" project incurred payments for three years—2022, 2023, and 2024—at 9.9 million yuan annually.

Acceptance inspections by non-experts turned into formalities, yet millions in service fees were paid in full. Given the significant gap between the "City Brain's" operational performance and expectations, how did it pass acceptance reviews? And why were operating fees totaling nearly 30 million yuan paid for three consecutive years? The acceptance documentation for the "City Brain" project over the three years was voluminous, with five to six thick folders each year, exceeding a thousand pages in total. Taking 2024 as an example, the acceptance expert group was formed at 3:20 PM on November 4th, and the acceptance review was completed by 5:20 PM that same day—a total of 120 minutes. During the review, experts had to examine about ten pages of material per minute, and these were highly specialized documents. The reporter discovered that the acceptance experts came from a wide range of unrelated fields, including the municipal compulsory drug rehabilitation center, a district court, agricultural schools, and hospitals—clearly not data-industry specialists. The head of the Digital Government Division at the Qujing Data Bureau, who also participated in the acceptance meetings, told the reporter that the review method was primarily to check whether the construction items listed in the plan had been built; if they were built, the experts passed them. However, completion of construction did not equate to operational use. The contract stipulated that new applications had to be added each year. In the 2024 acceptance materials, a new project called the "Data Element Operations Platform" was included. Zhao Guoliang, Section Chief of the Digital Government Division at the Qujing Data Bureau, stated that the original expectation for this project was to explore data elements, value demonstration, and operations, "but it truly did not play its intended role." In 2025, a Qujing Municipal Party Committee 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. The partner company felt the payments were insufficient to fund further remedial work. Given the platform's poor performance and to save fiscal resources, the decision was ultimately made to shut it down. A representative from the Qujing Digital Economy Company noted that software requires continuous iteration to improve; without funding, the company couldn't sustain operations and had to pull out. From 2025, the Qujing government decided to stop paying operating fees to the operator, and the Qujing Data Bureau signed a contract termination agreement with Qujing Digital Company, ending the "City Brain" project. In March 2026, Qujing Tong was fully delisted from all mobile app stores, permanently terminating all services.

Abandon the focus on construction over effectiveness; digital government must reject "digital potted plants." It is understood that the total investment in the entire "City Brain" project was 46.7 million yuan. The loss from the project's shutdown goes beyond wasted fiscal funds; state-owned enterprises in Qujing and its affiliated counties were also involved. In 2021, to facilitate the project's construction, under the guidance of the municipal party committee and government, 11 local state-owned platform companies invested 17 million yuan, holding a nearly 40% stake in the Qujing Digital Economy Company. With the "City Brain" project's failure, the Qujing Digital Economy Company has suffered sustained losses, and these platform companies, as investors, are also extremely frustrated. Xie Xianzhi, the project manager at the Qujing Industry Investment Company, stated that for enterprises in prefecture-level cities like Qujing, there is a lack of professional data talent. "Our capabilities are insufficient. In future investments, we will gradually exit from projects where we lack professional expertise and that are not part of our core business." To better promote the integrated construction of e-government, since 2022, the General Office of the State Council has successively issued documents such as the "Guidelines for Building a National Integrated Government Big Data System" and the "Regulations on Government Data Sharing." In January 2026, the "Regulatory Measures for the Standardized Management of Government Mobile Internet Applications" was also issued, requiring the closure and cancellation of government applications with low usage frequency and poor practicality, and clarifying that units below the county level should, in principle, not develop government applications. All regions should unify data standards and build and share systems collectively to eliminate redundant construction at its source. Digitalization is not the goal; it is a means. The public's ability and willingness to use these services is the true purpose of digital government. Only by being practical, starting from actual needs, and basing decisions on one's own capabilities can e-government and smart city construction avoid repeating the mistake of "building without using, and using without effect." This is how every cent of fiscal investment can be spent where it matters, ensuring digitalization becomes a genuine tool for improving governance efficiency and facilitating public services, rather than a decorative "digital potted plant."