Gogpay: Digital Service Platform Benefits Local Residents

If someone decides to settle down in Southwestern China’s Guizhou province, it’s better to download an application on his / her mobile phone—Gogpay, to make living in the city easier and more convenient. 

Gogpay, photo originated from the internet

Gogpay is a digital platform to provide a wide range of information and assistance, especially for local residents, including paying electricity bills, filing taxation, buying local agricultural products and ordering housekeeping services.

Since launched in 2015 by local government, it has more than 14.6 million real-name users.

Concentrating on the governance and operation of the city on the “cloud”, Gogpay integrates 1,467 items of various government and public services in Guizhou and provides services in those fields. 

Zeng, native of Guiyang, the provincial capital, who declines to give her full name, said she uses the application to pay water, electricity, gas and other fees for her parents online.

“I used to worry about my elderly parents go to different service halls to pay various fees, but now this problem has been solved via the application,” she said. 

Gogpay has also contributed to the digital transformation of the real economy. Last year, Guizhou provincial government sent consumer coupons through Gogpay to promote consumption growth of nearly 3 billion yuan. Some 190,000 catering stores, 480,000 retail stores, 561 online automobile retail companies, several key cultural tourism industries and agricultural products sales companies from Guizhou participated in the promotion. It not only boosted local consumption, but also attracted purchases from other provinces, especially in selling local specialties. 

Li Hang, a graduate student of Tsinghua University who recently visited Guizhou, tried the application and felt it very convenient. 

When she looked for local agricultural products, she surprisingly found that Lao Gan Ma chili sauce was sold at the application. 

The development of Gogpay is based on “Guizhou-Cloud”, China’s first provincial-level government data exchange and sharing platform.

Built in 2014 by the provincial government, it integrates information from 736 government applications, 17,204 metadata catalogs, and 108 provincial government portal websites.

As the “big data valley of China”, Guizhou is accelerating the in-depth integration of big data and various industries. Digital service platform like Gogpay that covers urban and rural areas across the province has further deepened the application of big data in public service.

“I use Gogpay a lot last year,” said Mei Qian, a graduate student at Guizhou Minzu University in Guiyang. 

“It is good for us local residents to meet our needs online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The innovative application of big data has reduced many inconveniences in daily life, and I look forward to its further development.”

Reporter｜Huang Sinan