China Focus: Sharing government data benefits public

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0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Xinhua, May 29, 2017
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GUIYANG, May 29 (Xinhua) -- "Grow up, bamboo shoots! Wake up, spring is coming," a pupil at Yata Elementary School reads from a textbook.

The school in a remote mountainous area of southwest China's Guizhou Province is an area of significant poverty, with telephones only becoming available in recent years.

But now, via a cloud computing education system, students at the school can read the same books and listen to the same teachers with those at Xingyi Elementary School, the best school in Qianxinan, only 100 kilometers away. Gone are the days when the only teaching facility at Yata was a box of chalk and a blackboard.

China is encouraging the sharing of big data, particularly that from the government, for public benefit.

Last week, the State Council released a circular calling for the sharing of government data to bring maximum benefit to the public. It suggested departments of the State Council and local governments share their information systems to improve administrative efficiency.

According to statistics from the ongoing 2017 China International Big Data Expo in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province, more than 80 percent of China's big data is in the hands of government authorities.

"The biggest value of government data is in sharing and opening to the public," said Wu Hequan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Local governments have been taking action. In eastern Zhejiang Province, the provincial government has opened its data on the Internet. By 2020, local residents will no longer need to go to government offices for at least half of all government-related affairs.

In neighboring Jiangsu Province, the local government is speeding up reforms to open data to the public. For example, residents can now directly pay taxes or get tax reimbursement on one of the government's websites.

In Guizhou, a pilot province for big data building in China, a cloud computing system has been developed for information sharing. Currently, 36 government departments in the province, including the Guizhou Health and Family Planning Commission, and the Guizhou Department of Human Resources and Social Security, have put their data system on the platform.

A regulation has also been issued in Guizhou, requiring that government data in areas such as credit, transport and healthcare should be the first to open to public.

"In the past, residents had to go to government offices to handle administrative affairs, but now things can be done with a few clicks of the mouse thanks to government data sharing," said Zhang Xiao, deputy director of the China Internet Network Information Center.

"With the opening of government data, government authorities can analyze public needs to provide better services to the general public," said Tang Zhiwei, with University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

"Big data has truly become a new driving force behind the development of our society," said Ni Guangnan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering. "Governments at the local level should learn from each other and provide better services to the public." Enditem

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