In October 2025 a retired soldier in Tongling, Anhui province, watched relief payments and a provincially backed supplemental health plan land in his account without having to apply. Li Dehai had fallen into severe illness and was slipping through the cracks because annual out-of-pocket medical costs were missing from his household registration. A new municipal initiative flagged his unusually high medical spending through cross-department data comparison, prompted a doorstep verification by local staff, and within three working days had completed the paperwork to secure both cash assistance and enrolment in Anhui’s Huiminbao health protection.
The program behind Li’s rescue is called Chongjun Youshu, literally "respecting veterans by the numbers" — a Tongling city campaign to build what officials describe as "living digital archives" for veterans. Rather than wait for claims or petitions, the system aggregates records from veterans affairs, social security, health insurance, police and market regulation databases, runs automated checks for anomalies such as high medical bills or sudden income loss, and triggers human follow-up at township and community levels.
Administratively the campaign stitches together a four-tier operational chain — city, county/district, township and village/community — and emphasizes both internal and external data sharing to eliminate information silos. Guided operating manuals, 24-hour support channels and a three-stage quality control process (township self-check, county audit, city review) are designed to reduce errors at source and keep records current through periodic recheck and flexible collection methods including home visits and remote intake.
Since the action began, Tongling reports it screened some 41,000 veterans and other benefit recipients, achieving 96 percent coverage and updating 30,700 records. Beyond hardship relief, the same multi-source data pool has been used to identify more than a thousand veteran-founded enterprises and to construct a precise jobs-demand database that replaces large, undifferentiated recruitment fairs with targeted, one-to-one job matches.
The program also powers what officials call "automatic entitlement": the veterans database interfaces with the social-support system and uses early-warning models to flag eligible individuals for assistance without a formal application. For those verified as poor, Tongling issues one-off special assistance payments and automatically buys them into provincial supplementary health insurance, creating a double safety net.
On the ground the initiative is framed as a service revolution: outreach staff say that visits to verify data become moments of social connection, while veterans report quicker, warmer responses. Administratively it is also a demonstration of data governance in practice — trying to make public services proactive instead of reactive by turning administrative data into operational triggers for targeted welfare.
The results are a potent mix of technology and local statecraft. For readers outside China, the exercise resembles broader international trends in predictive and automated welfare administration: governments increasingly use administrative data to identify vulnerability quickly and to reduce application burdens. Tongling’s experiment shows the gains in speed and precision that come from cross-agency integration, but it also raises familiar questions about data quality, exclusion when records are incomplete, and safeguards for personal information.
Those risks are not invisible to municipal planners: the campaign’s emphasis on layered verification and on-the-ground follow-up is intended to catch false positives and to correct missing information. Yet the program’s success depends on the persistence of inter-agency cooperation, constant updating of data flows, and training at the grassroots — the very points where resource constraints and bureaucratic friction typically reassert themselves.
Tongling’s project is both a local service upgrade and a signal. It shows how Chinese localities can deploy digital tools to shore up targeted social spending and to strengthen the state’s capacity to deliver benefits without prompting. If scaled, such systems could materially change how welfare and veteran services are administered across China, raising the bar for responsiveness while intensifying debates about data governance and administrative reach.