Suspicions over bidding process of ticket booking system

A college student has asked the Ministry of Railways (MOR) to disclose the bidding process for its costly ticket booking system, with Chinese netizens backing his demand.

The website 12306.cn, which reportedly cost 330 million yuan (about 49 million U.S. dollars), failed to work properly ahead of China's eight-day holidays, arousing public wrath over the Internet.

Huang Huanting, a student with the Northwestern Normal University, wrote to the MOR on Monday asking for information about its bidding process.

MOR should release related information voluntarily because the cost of the website comes from taxes and citizens have the right to know about such details, said Huang.

Huang's request was backed by Internet users, including a lawyer and a critic.

The critic, Zhou Xiaoyun, posted eight questions on the bidding fog to MOR on Sina Weibo, asking for bidder names, their project details, quoted prices, reasons to select the bidders and the name of the evaluation committee. Zhou's request was forwarded 27,000 times within two days.

Media reports said the ministry selected two companies to be in charge of the website construction, which was launched last June. The companies were given 199 million yuan and 130 million yuan for hardware and software respectively. However, it is not clear how the companies were determined.

People have speculated kickbacks were embedded in the website project bidding process but railway authorities blamed the malfunction on huge visitor flow with the holidays fast approaching, adding the website receives 1.5 billion clicks at peak time.

Chinese people will have an eight-day holiday starting on Sunday to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Day on Sept. 30 and the National Holiday on Oct. 1, which will mean huge numbers of traveling and great pressure on railway transportation.

However, netizens were not buying the explanation.

"Considering China's 1.3-billion population and the huge spending on the website, nearly 1.5 billion page views is not a big number," posted a netizen under the name of "ChocoSundae" at the Sina Weibo, a Chinese twitter-like microblogging service.

Statistics from a third-party data collector, alexa.cn, showed that the visitor flow on 12306.cn, even at its peak time, is lower than other Chinese major online retailers like Taobao.com.

This case reminded people of the huge kickback case of the MOR earlier this year, when a couple in the ministry were investigated for suspected corruption from a five-minute railway promotional video in 2010, which cost 18.5 million yuan (2.90 million U.S. dollars).

"The ministry spends so much on a video and poor website, but is short for money to build railways. How great the corruption is!" said a Sina Weibo user named "Wudiyizhiding".

The MOR said the ticket book system "was still being upgraded" and will improve, said an official.

Similar requests happened to Yang Dacai, former chief of the Shaanxi Provincial Administration of Work Safety, who was dismissed after netizens found him wearing a selection of 11 expensive watches, customized glasses and bracelets.

Earlier this month, the Shaanxi Bureau of Finance turned down an application by university student Liu Yanfeng for Yang's personal assets to be disclosed.

Liu said on Wednesday that he intended to sue the bureau and the provincial safety administration where Yang worked, for violating the country's regulations on government information disclosure.

Tang Xiaotian, a professor with Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said pressure from netizens in the virtual world has turned into power in reality.

"The way government uses money has not been challenged before," said Tang. "If the MOR is forced to disclose the bidding process, it will be a milestone for Chinese netizens fighting corruption."