A digital government project costing tens of millions of yuan has been exposed as a costly failure, with its flagship app attracting barely more than a handful of daily users. The case has sparked fresh debate about the effectiveness of China's ambitious push for smart city construction.

Local governments across the country have accelerated efforts to build "urban brains" and "smart cities" in recent years. However, some projects, funded with millions in public money, have ended up abandoned shortly after completion, trapped in a cycle of "built but unused, operational but idle."

In Qujing City, Yunnan Province, a once-celebrated digital project has now been completely shut down, revealing systemic flaws in how such initiatives are planned, approved, and evaluated. The "Digital Qujing Operations Center," located in a local industrial park, now stands empty. The office, once home to the team behind Qujing's "City Brain" and its citizen-facing app, is deserted, with no staff on site.

The app, known as QujingTong, was designed as a one-stop portal for city services. Random interviews with local residents show that most are barely aware of its existence. Among the few who have used it, the consensus is that it serves little purpose beyond elementary school enrollment. With a permanent population of over 5.5 million, the app's daily active users hovered around just 60 by the end of 2025.

Launched in 2021, QujingTong offered more than 70 functions, but only six were built locally. The rest were simple links replicating features already available in other applications, particularly from the provincial platform Yunnan One-Stop Service. That provincial app, launched back in 2019, had already established a strong user base in Qujing, with around 1.9 million registered users and over 21.5 million transactions. It was more comprehensive, more popular, and did not require additional local investment.

So why did Qujing commission a redundant app? Reports indicate that QujingTong was just a small component of a much larger "City Brain" project initiated in 2021 at the behest of the city's top leadership. The local government invited an external company to invest and restructure the Qujing Digital Economy Company, with the government agreeing to purchase services under a "co-construction" model.

Wu Yihua, a vice mayor of Qujing, reflected on the decision, admitting that the success story of Hangzhou's "City Brain" influenced their ambitions. "Everyone saw its benefits, but failed to recognize the gap in their own capabilities," he recalled. The decision, he said, was flawed from the start. Lacking technical expertise locally, the government handed over the core technical design to the external contractor, which produced an all-encompassing proposal. This included a data center, a "Digital Cockpit" display center, and two platforms: QujingTong and an integrated governance system.

The most visible part of the project was the "Digital Cockpit," a multi-meter-long display screen that aggregated city data. However, it appears the local government had no clear idea of what the "City Brain" should actually do. After its completion, officials found that not only was the app unused, but the governance platform also failed to deliver. The platform was intended to solve complex cross-departmental issues across urban management, environmental protection, and emergency response. In reality, most of its functions were purely decorative.

Despite the poor performance, the project continued to receive payments. The contract stipulated an annual service fee capped at 10 million yuan, subject to performance reviews. Qujing paid 9.9 million yuan each year for three years (2022-2024), totaling nearly 30 million yuan.

Allowing such subpar results to pass formal acceptance checks for three consecutive years raises serious questions. The acceptance process appears to have been a mere formality. For the 2024 review, the expert panel was assembled at 3:20 PM and completed its assessment by 5:20 PM—a total of 120 minutes to review over a thousand pages of highly technical material. That equates to over ten pages of documents per minute per expert. The experts themselves came from backgrounds unrelated to data technology, including a drug rehabilitation center, a district court, and an agricultural school.

Zhao Guoliang, head of the Digital Government Division at Qujing's Data Bureau, admitted the review process mainly checked whether listed items had been built, not whether they were actually being used. The contract also required new application projects each year. In 2024, a "Data Element Operations Platform" was added, but Zhao conceded it "indeed failed to play its due role."

The charade came to an end in 2025 when a municipal inspection team flagged the project as a waste of fiscal funds. Attempts to renegotiate improvements with the contractor failed. The company argued that the payments were insufficient to cover further modifications, prompting the city to cut its losses and terminate the agreement. Starting in 2025, payments ceased, and by March 2026, the QujingTong app was completely delisted from all app stores.

Beyond the direct financial loss, the failure has hurt local state-owned enterprises. To push the project forward, 11 state-owned platform companies contributed 17 million yuan in 2021, acquiring a near 40% stake in Qujing Digital Economy Company. The project's collapse has left these investors with continued losses. Xie Xianzhi, a project manager at Qujing Industry Investment Company, noted the lack of professional data talent in prefecture-level cities like theirs. "For projects outside our core expertise and reserve capabilities, we will choose to exit gradually," he said.

The central government has recognized the systemic issues. Since 2022, the State Council has issued guidelines on integrated e-government data systems and data sharing regulations. A further regulation in January 2026 mandated the shutdown of low-frequency and impractical government apps, explicitly prohibiting county-level and lower authorities from developing new ones. The goal is unified data standards and shared systems to root out redundant construction.

Digitalization is a means, not an end. The ultimate test of digital governance is whether it serves the people effectively. Only by basing decisions on actual needs and realistic capabilities can e-government and smart city initiatives avoid becoming "digital bonsai"—ornamental but useless, wasting public money and failing to improve governance efficiency.