Chinese city officials told to base their decisions on big data, not experience

Chen Yixin, secretary general of the party’s top law enforcement agency, also called for more intensive and ‘comprehensive’ collection of data

Beijing’s latest push for ‘smart governance’ comes as global pressure grows to create binding rules on the use of artificial intelligence

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China introduced a “smart governance” pilot scheme across 81 cities last year. Officials have been told to “modernise” governance with the use of big data and artificial intelligence. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 9:20pm, 26 Nov 2021

City governments should rely on big data rather than their experience when making key decisions as a way to reduce risks, a senior Chinese security official has told cadres, and he said to do this more data needed to be collected.

Chen Yixin, secretary general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the top Communist Party agency in charge of law enforcement, made the remarks at a work conference on Beijing’s so-called smart governance programme on Thursday.

He called for city officials across China to make the shift from “experience-driven” decisions to basing them on big data analysis, and to “use smart governance to improve capabilities and to warn of and deal with risks”, according to a statement on the commission’s WeChat account.

The smart governance pilot scheme – “modernising” governance with the use of big data and artificial intelligence, particularly surveillance technology – was introduced across 81 cities last year.

Officials from those cities were at the conference in Beijing, according to the statement, including two from the far western Xinjiang region, where the use of big data and artificial intelligence for surveillance has been criticised by the West.

Chen Yixin, secretary general of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, said systems should be put in place so that data can be shared between departments. Photo: Weibo

“[We] must pay attention to … improve our capacity to deal with and anticipate risk using smart governance,” Chen told the conference.