In recent years, the rise of big data and digitalization has accelerated digital government construction across China. Many localities have rushed to build "city brains" or "smart cities," making beneficial attempts to improve government efficiency and provide better services. However, some local governments have invested tens of millions of yuan into digital projects, only to find them caught in the awkward predicament of "idle upon completion and empty upon operation."

Not long ago, digital projects in Qujing, Yunnan Province, were exposed for having issues such as incomplete construction and suspension. Money was spent and projects were built, but why aren't they being used? What exactly caused these projects to fail? Reporters launched an investigation into the matter.

Recently, reporters visited a "Digital Qujing Operations Center" in an industrial park in Qujing City, Yunnan Province. This location once housed the construction of Qujing's "City Brain" and the "Qujing Tong" app projects. Now, however, it stands deserted, with the empty office space indicating that no one has worked here for a long time. The offices have been cleared out, and the Qujing Tong app developed by the company has also disappeared.

Qujing Tong is a city-level government service app. In random street interviews with residents of Qujing, most expressed little familiarity with it. The few citizens who had used Qujing Tong reported that, apart from registering their children for primary school, the app was almost entirely useless in daily life.

Reporters subsequently went to the Qujing Municipal Data Bureau to learn more. Wang Kun, Director of the Qujing Municipal Data Bureau, stated that as of the end of 2025, the Qujing Tong app had only around 60 daily active users. With Qujing's permanent population exceeding 5.5 million, why does the app have only 60 daily active users?

It is understood that Qujing Tong was launched in 2021. Of its over seventy applications, only six were self-built. The rest were merely links to other applications, fully duplicating the functions of existing apps, many of which came from Yunnan Province's "One App for Everything" (Yibushou Banshitong) platform. Yunnan Province had launched this application as early as 2019, covering government services at the provincial, municipal, county, and township levels. In Qujing, it had approximately 1.9 million registered real-name users and a cumulative transaction volume of about 21.54 million items.

The provincial app was built earlier, offers more complete functions, and is preferred by residents. It also saves localities from making further investments. With a provincial platform already in place, the local government app was inherently redundant construction. Citizens didn't like using it, and it naturally lost its vitality. So why did Qujing engage in such redundant construction at that time?

Reporters learned that Qujing Tong was just a small part of Qujing's "City Brain" project. In 2021, driven by the city's then top leader, Qujing introduced an outside enterprise through bidding to invest and restructure the Qujing Digital Economy Company. The government then jointly built the "City Brain" by purchasing services. What was the original intention behind building this "City Brain"?

Wu Yihua, Member of the Standing Committee of the Qujing Municipal Committee and Vice Mayor, explained that they saw the significant benefits Hangzhou's "City Brain" brought to urban governance. "Everyone saw its benefits, but didn't see the gap in our own capabilities," he admitted. "When we lacked the ability ourselves, we believed external parties might have it. I think there's a weak link here regarding scientific decision-making."

Because the local government lacked technical expertise, it handed over both the technical feasibility study and the leadership of the solution design to the external enterprise. The company proposed a grand and all-encompassing "City Brain plan," which included a database, data capability center, an operational display center called a "Digital Cockpit," and two application platforms: "Qujing Tong" and "Unified Network Management." The most visually impressive component was the "Digital Cockpit."

Wang Kun described it as similar to the display in front of a car driver, integrating relevant data for display on a screen over ten meters long. However, despite having the large display screen, the local government wasn't clear on how the "City Brain" should actually be built. The service contract signed between the government and the operating company only vaguely stipulated requirements such as "operation management, data governance, and system operation and maintenance services."

After the "City Brain" was completed, the local government found that not only was Qujing Tong unused, but the "Unified Network Management" platform also fell flat. This platform was planned to cover more than ten areas, including urban operation management, environmental protection, comprehensive governance, emergency management, health, and education, aiming to "solve complex cross-departmental and cross-hierarchy problems with digitalization." However, most of these functions also remained merely for display purposes.

The project's operation did not meet expectations. However, according to the contract, after the project passed acceptance, the government was to pay an annual operation service fee based on annual assessment results, capped at 10 million yuan per year. Wang Kun stated that they paid 9.9 million yuan each year in 2022, 2023, and 2024, totaling three years of payments for the entire "City Brain" project.

Given the huge gap between the "City Brain's" operational effect and expectations, how did it pass the initial acceptance? And why were operation fees of nearly 30 million yuan paid for three consecutive years? The project's acceptance records for the past three years show thick binders, five or six volumes each year, exceeding a thousand pages in total. For example, in 2024, the expert group for project acceptance was formed at 15:20 on November 4th, and acceptance was completed by 17:20 the same day—a total of 120 minutes. Experts reviewed the materials on-site, having to read more than ten pages per minute, and these materials were highly technical.

Reporters found that the backgrounds of these acceptance experts were varied. Some came from the municipal compulsory drug rehabilitation center, others from the district court, and still others from agricultural schools and hospitals. Clearly, they were not data industry experts. How was such rapid acceptance conducted? The head of the Digital Government Division at the Qujing Data Bureau, who participated in the acceptance meeting, told reporters that their method was mainly to check whether the construction content outlined in the plan had been built. If it was built, the experts passed it.

However, construction completion does not mean the project is put into use. The contract stipulated that new application projects must be added each year. In the 2024 acceptance records, a new "Data Element Operation Platform" project was added. Has this project been put into use? Zhao Guoliang, Chief of the Digital Government Division at the Qujing Municipal Data Bureau, said, "Data trading has not been realized. The original expectation was for it to achieve some results in exploring data elements, value demonstration, and operation as a long-term effort. But indeed, it hasn't played its proper 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 communicated about how to improve the project's functions but failed to reach an agreement. Staff at the Qujing Municipal Data Bureau told reporters that during the rectification process, the partner felt the money provided was insufficient to continue making more improvements. With the platform underperforming, and to save fiscal funds, the decision was ultimately made to shut it down.

The head of the Qujing Digital Economy Company believed that software needs constant updates and iterative optimization to become more user-friendly. "Without funding, the company couldn't sustain it and had to withdraw." Starting in 2025, the Qujing municipal government decided to stop paying operation fees to the operator. The Qujing Data Bureau and Qujing Digital Company signed a contract termination agreement, and the "City Brain" project ceased operations. In March 2026, Qujing Tong was completely removed from major mobile app stores, permanently terminating all services.

Meng Qingguo, Executive Dean of the National Governance Research Institute at Tsinghua University, commented that some localities blindly pursue new concepts and "high-end" projects with grand, all-encompassing digital initiatives. "This kind of pursuit is divorced from reality and the needs of the people. Things that look good on the surface are actually difficult to build and even harder to truly make work."

In reality, the losses from Qujing's "City Brain" extended beyond wasted fiscal funds. State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Qujing and its subordinate counties also participated. In 2021, to facilitate the project's construction, guided by the municipal party committee and government, 11 local state-owned platform companies invested 17 million yuan, holding nearly 40% of the shares in the Qujing Digital Economy Company. After the "City Brain" project failed, the company continued to incur losses, and these platform companies, as investors, felt extremely helpless.

It is understood that for the entire Qujing "City Brain" project, the municipal fiscal investment totaled 29.7 million yuan, and local SOEs contributed 17 million yuan. Qujing's total local investment amounted to 46.7 million yuan. With the project's termination, these investments clearly failed to achieve their intended effects.

Leaders from local platform companies and the Data Bureau reflected on this "impulsive investment." Xie Xianzhi, Project Manager of Qujing Industrial Investment Company, admitted, "For enterprises in prefecture-level cities like Qujing, we lack professional talent in the data field. Our capabilities are insufficient. In future investments, we will choose to gradually withdraw from projects where we lack professional expertise or that are not our core business."

Wang Kun offered his personal view: "This matter has representative significance. We can no longer only focus on construction without paying attention to actual user needs and how things are used. We should do more things with strong demand, not just those that meet people's livelihood needs. Personally, I think the government also needs to meet the needs of the market economy. We cannot act recklessly."

Qujing has learned a profound lesson in digital project construction. 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 "National Integrated Government Big Data System Construction Guide" and the "Government Data Sharing Regulations." In January 2026, the "Measures for the Standardized Management of Government Mobile Internet Applications" was also introduced, requiring the timely closure and deregistration of government applications with low usage frequency and weak practicality. It also explicitly stipulates that units below the county level should generally not develop government applications. Localities should unify data standards and build and share systems together to fundamentally eliminate redundant construction.

Qujing's "City Brain" bought a painful lesson with tens of millions of yuan in investment: digitalization is not the goal, but a means. What people can use and use well is the original intention of digital government services. Only by being practical, starting from actual needs, and starting from one's own capabilities can our e-government and smart city construction avoid repeating the mistake of "building but not using, using but not effectively." Only then can every penny of fiscal investment be spent wisely, making digitalization a real tool for improving governance efficiency and facilitating public services, rather than a "digital bonsai" for show. This also serves as a "golden benchmark" for testing the establishment and practice of a correct view of political achievements.