State Information Capacity and Government Responsiveness: Digital Platform-Driven Reforms in Chinese Local Governance

Government responsiveness, understood as the capacity of the state to recognise and act upon citizen demands, remains a central determinant of political legitimacy in authoritarian regimes. In China, conventional responsiveness has long been constrained by information asymmetries within a multilevel bureaucracy and by the strategic behaviour of local agents, who accommodate demands in conditional, selective, formulaic, or evasive ways. This article argues that recent digital platform reforms, exemplified by Beijing’s ‘12345 Citizen Service Hotline’ and its ‘Immediate Response to Appeals’ (jiesu jiban) initiative, are altering this configuration by strengthening state information capacity. Drawing on principal-agent theory and a case-based analysis of the 12345 system, this article traces the platform’s evolution across three phases and shows how each enables progressively more centralised oversight, inter-agency coordination, and proactive issue resolution. It proposes the concept of ‘comprehensive responsiveness’ to capture the shift from reactive, selective response to anticipatory, traceable governance. The argument cuts two ways. The same centralisation that improves oversight erodes local autonomy, deepens digital divides, and exposes the system to ‘responsiveness fatigue’, in which procedural efficiency outpaces substantive resolution and may corrode the trust it was designed to cultivate.