The State Council released a circular on the results of a nationwide inspection of government websites conducted in the fourth quarter of 2017.
As of Dec 1, 24,820 government websites were in operation, including 1,961 affiliated with State Council departments and 32 provincial-level government portal websites.
The State Council’s general office conducted a random inspection of 460 websites, of which 95 percent were qualified. It’s worth noting that the websites of Beijing, Tianjin, Hainan, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps were rated as 100 percent qualified over four consecutive quarters.
All provincial regions and 71 departments of the State Council selected 12,336 websites under their respective administrations, which accounted for 50 percent of government websites with a 96 percent total qualification rate.
Valid messages via platforms for people to mention errors on government websites totaled 14,208 in the fourth quarter, among which 99 percent were answered. For 25 websites selected from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Shanghai, Hunan, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the figure reached 100 percent.
Also during the same period, 116 officials were punished or received warnings for running unqualified websites.
In 2017, all regions and departments had inspected 43,139 government websites at all levels. A total of 21,513 websites with poor maintenance were integrated or migrated and 625 officials were held accountable for the substandard websites.
Some problems surfaced in the process, such as unregulated domain names and logos, lack of overall rectification measures, poor interactions with netizens and insufficient security control.
Based on the results of the inspection, the circular urged more efforts to supervise government websites and to provide better government services online.
Regions and departments at all levels should enhance regular website supervision, operationalize correction measures, better interact with netizens to address their concerns, and improve security mechanisms to ensure government websites are safe and reliable.
