E-government HCI in China: How Does the Government Communicate a New Regulation System to the Public?

The e-government landscape in China has undergone substantial changes during the past decades, which is also highlighted by the launch of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) in 2014. As a novel digitally-implemented system with high societal relevance, the SCS should also be scrutinized as a critical case to explore how human-computer interaction (HCI) challenges are addressed in an e-government system in China. The Chinese HCI research community has so far primarily focused on a variety of technological perspectives. However, little attention has been paid to the behavioral dimensions of HCI. In this paper, we make two contributions. We provide the first empirical study of the SCS at the city level. We further investigate how the Chinese government communicates a new regulation system to the public. In particular, we reviewed important examples of municipal SCS platforms and developed an analysis along three key HCI issues – usability, accessibility and privacy protection.