Governments are increasingly placing an emphasis on the long‐term growth of e‐government development. However, the evaluation of e‐government development is still in its infancy. The current research proposes a multi‐dimensional evaluation system of e‐government development based on Complex Systems Theory. Accordingly, we extracted three dimensions with 17 criteria and collected actual data of e‐government development from 17 cities in Shandong, China as an example. The Analytic Hierarchy Process‐Entropy Method (AHP‐EM) was employed to correctly and objectively evaluate the performance of e‐government development. Furthermore, we analyze the current situations and deficiencies of e‐government development in each city of Shandong, China and offer recommendations for sustainable e‐government development using geographical distribution maps and radar graph.