A woman enters a store on Nanjing Road E. in downtown Shanghai by showing her health code. The Suishenban codes have been used millions of times since the pandemic outbreak.

Since its introduction four years ago, Shanghai's official e-governance platform, Government Online-Offline Shanghai (一网通办), has served about 74 million users and processed 263 million applications, the Shanghai government said.

Nearly all government services, including those related to the health code, education, health care, public transportation, and even company registration, are available through the one-stop, unified platform. By sharing information from different departments, it makes it easier for people to use services and gives the city "soft power."

Currently, it has 73.96 million individual users and 2.9 million enterprise users, which is triple the number of permanent residents in Shanghai. That is because the platform also caters to foreigners and residents of other provinces, particularly those who reside in the Yangtze River Delta region.

Over the last four years, it has handled 263 million applications while helping with inquiries and related application services in 18 core categories.

A message posted on the local government's WeChat account claims that applicants can expect a response as quickly as "within three minutes."

The core categories include company registration, business change and deregistration, as well as residency, finances, tax, social security, health care, culture and tourism, education, and public law services.

It operates the mobile application called Suishenban (随申办), which includes a health code system that was introduced to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The Suishenban color codes have been used 14.6 billion times by 73.31 million users.

"The platform fosters innovation in governance paradigms, creates new digital governing approaches, helps in the city's digital transformation, and strengthens its soft power," the message said.

Shanghai has also released two city-level rules, including a data management policy in 2021, to ensure data safety and boost the platform's development.

The platform's impact extends outside of Shanghai.

The Yangtze River Delta area currently recognizes 37 categories of digital certificates and approvals on the platform. The region's data trade volume has topped 450 million.