Global E-Government - Global Geographies of the Internet - page 123

Although Japan has an excellent information technology infrastructure, its steps
toward e-government have lagged behind other OECD nations (Koga 2003 ). The
Japanese government, which long exhibited a lackluster attitude toward govern-
ment openness that threatened the power of its entrenched bureaucracy, developed
an e-government master plan in 1997 that led to the e-Japan Strategy I in 2001 and
e-Japan Strategy II in 2003 (Yonemaru 2004 ). However, national e-government
websites are largely confined to the simple provision of forms and information,
putting the country in the first stage of Layne and Lee's ( 2001 ) developmental
sequence. At the core of this initiative is the e-Gov.go.jp website, designed to serve
as a centralized gateway to national e-government channels. The Juki-Net resident
registry network, launched in 2002, compiles personal information about residents
to facilitate the dispersal of government entitlement funding and allows them to
move among cities without duplicating registration efforts. However, despite the
centralized nature of the Japanese state, e-government implementation has been
uneven among the nation's prefectures, with well-established systems in the greater
Tokyo-Yokohama region and lesser degrees of implementation in Hokkaido and
Shikoku. Japanese cities have implemented e-government in a wide range of modes
and levels of sophistication (Tanaka et al. 2005 ), ranging from almost nil
involvement among some hamlets to inter-government local area networks (LANs).
China's burgeoning ventures into e-government have also attracted consider-
able attention (Holliday and Yep 2005 ; Ma et al. 2005 ; Chen et al. 2009 ; Zhao
2010 ; Yang et al. 2012 ). Initially its efforts were aimed at purely economic goals
such as tariff collection, import-export licenses, and currency exchange settle-
ment; more recently these have given way to the wider strategy to decentralize the
mechanisms of public governance, gain control over corruption, enhance
responsiveness, and accelerate economic competitiveness under the National In-
formatization (Guojia Xinxihua) plan. China's Government Online Project
(Zhengfu Shangwang Gongcheng), launched in 1999, has focused on putting
government documents on the web and promote online databases. China's deeply
centralized political system, however, presents obstacles to this strategy, including
conflicting priorities and offices with bloated staff numbers. It should, of course, be
recalled that China is among the most severe internet censors in the world Chapter
3 . At the municipal level, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Nanhai, and Shenzen have
taken the lead in online company registrations, tax collections, and community
information services. For example, Shanghai has a digital social security smart
card system in place.
5.3.4 Southeast Asia
The rapidly emerging economies of Southeast Asia reveal considerable variation
in e-government readiness and implementation, ranging from Singapore, one of
the world's leaders in e-government, to countries such as Myanmar, where it is
non-existent.