On August 26, a CCTV investigative program exposed a case of a digital government project in Qujing City, Yunnan Province, that has become a "digital bonsai" - a costly digital display piece with no real function. The project, which cost local taxpayers and state-owned enterprises a combined 46.7 million yuan, has been shut down entirely after failing to attract users or deliver on its promises.
The now-defunct "Digital Qujing Operations Center" sits empty in a local industrial park. The facility once housed the city's "Urban Brain" project and the Qujing Tong app, a government service application. Today, the office space is deserted, and the app has been removed from all major app stores. Local residents interviewed on the street expressed little familiarity with Qujing Tong, and those who had used it said it was only useful for primary school enrollment registration.
Data from the Qujing City Data Bureau shows that as of the end of 2025, the Qujing Tong app had only about 60 daily active users, despite the city having a permanent population of over 5.5 million people. The app was launched in 2021 with more than 70 features, but only six were independently developed. The remaining functions were simply links to other applications, duplicating services already available on Yunnan Province's "One Mobile Phone for Everything" platform, which was established back in 2019 and covers all levels of government in the province. In Qujing alone, that provincial app has approximately 1.9 million registered users and has processed over 21.5 million transactions.
The provincial platform was built earlier, offers more comprehensive features, and is more popular with citizens, making the local app redundant from the start. So why did Qujing proceed with such duplicative construction? In 2021, under the leadership of the city's then top official, Qujing introduced an external company through a bidding process to restructure the Qujing Digital Economy Company. The government then purchased services from this entity to co-build the "Urban Brain" project.
Vice Mayor Wu Yihua acknowledged that the decision was inspired by Hangzhou's successful smart city initiatives, but admitted that local officials overlooked their own capacity gaps. Lacking in-house technical expertise, the city delegated the entire technical design and solution architecture to the external company. The firm delivered an all-encompassing "Urban Brain" proposal that included a data center, an operations display center called the "Digital Cockpit," and two application platforms including Qujing Tong and an "Integrated Grid Management" system.
The most visible element was the Digital Cockpit, a massive display screen measuring over ten meters long, designed to integrate and showcase various data streams. However, the city government had no clear understanding of how to actually build and operate a "Urban Brain." The service contract vaguely described requirements as "operations management, data governance, and system maintenance" without specific, measurable deliverables.
Once completed, the Integrated Grid Management platform also failed to live up to expectations. It was designed to handle urban operations, environmental protection, comprehensive governance, emergency management, and health and education across multiple sectors, but these functions largely remained at the display level, never integrating into actual government workflows. Despite the project's underperformance, the government paid annual operation fees of 9.9 million yuan for three consecutive years from 2022 to 2024, with a maximum annual payment capped at 10 million yuan under the contract terms.
How did such a failing project pass acceptance reviews for three straight years? Acceptance documentation for each year exceeded a thousand pages. In 2024, an expert panel was assembled at 3:20 PM and completed the acceptance review by 5:20 PM the same day - just 120 minutes to review hundreds of pages of highly technical material, which equates to over ten pages per minute per expert. The reviewers themselves came from unrelated backgrounds: a city compulsory drug rehabilitation center, a district court, an agricultural school, and a hospital - none had data industry expertise.
The review process was equally superficial. According to Zhao Guoliang, head of the Data Bureau's Digital Government Division, experts mainly checked whether the construction items listed in the plan had been built, and if so, the review passed. However, building something does not mean it was put into use. In 2024, a new "Data Element Trading Platform" was added to the project. It was never actually used for data transactions, despite initial hopes it would explore data element value and demonstration operations.
By 2025, a city inspection team identified that the project was wasting fiscal resources. Discussions between the Qujing Data Bureau and the Digital Economy Company on improvements reached an impasse. The partner company argued that the service fees were insufficient to fund additional rectification work. Facing an underperforming platform and pressure to save public funds, the city decided to terminate the project entirely. Starting in 2025, no further operational fees were paid, and in March 2026, the Qujing Tong app was completely removed from app stores, permanently ending all services.
The financial damage extends beyond direct fiscal spending. Eleven local state-owned platform companies, guided by the municipal government, contributed 17 million yuan in 2021 to acquire nearly 40% equity in the Qujing Digital Economy Company. With the project's failure, that company has sustained continuous losses, leaving these investors with nothing to show for their capital. In total, the municipal finance department invested 29.7 million yuan, and local SOEs added 17 million yuan, bringing the combined investment to 46.7 million yuan - all effectively lost.
Reflecting on the "impulsive investment," Xie Xianzhi, a project manager at Qujing Industrial Investment Company, admitted that local enterprises lacked professional data expertise and should have recognized their limitations. "For companies without sufficient professional capacity in a field outside their core business, we should gradually exit such investments," he said. Data Bureau Director Wang Kun offered a broader lesson: "People can no longer focus only on construction while ignoring actual user needs. We should do more things that meet strong demands - not just those aligned with people's livelihoods, but also those aligned with market economy principles. We cannot act recklessly."
Qujing's painful experience highlights the importance of unified digital governance. Since 2022, the State Council has issued guidelines on integrated e-government data system construction and data sharing regulations. In January 2026, new regulations on government mobile applications were introduced, requiring the closure of low-usage, low-utility apps and prohibiting development of government apps below the county level. These measures aim to standardize data protocols and promote shared system construction to eliminate duplication at its root. The 46.7 million yuan lesson from Qujing is clear: digitalization is a means, not an end. What citizens can actually use and use well is the fundamental purpose of digital government services.