Assessing the digital village development in China and its driving factors: An analysis using online media data

In recent years, digital and information technology has been increasingly diffusing into rural fields, providing new impetus for agricultural and rural development. All levels of government and institutions are putting in place a wide range of strategies to improve digital infrastructure, enhance digital skills, and promote digital inclusion in rural areas. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been continuously focused on accelerating digital transformation of agriculture and rural area to achieve sustainable development goals (Hernandez et al., 2024). The European Commission introduced the concept of ‘Smart Villages’ to promote digital transformation in villages and rural areas, aiming to enhance the sustainability of health, education, energy, transport, retail and other rural services through the deployment of digital tools (European Commission, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, 2023). The Chinese government has implemented the Digital Village Development Strategy since 2019, introducing policies and guidelines to build a digital countryside. 2.937 million 5G base stations has been constructed, almost covering all prefecture-level cities and county towns, with coverage continuing to expand. By 2023, the internet penetration rate in rural China reached 59.2 %, reflecting ongoing efforts to bridge the urban-rural digital divide (China Internet Network Information Center, 2023).

Building on a substantial body of work in digital geography, we recognise that digitalisation is not only a technological or economic process (Song et al., 2020; Shen et al., 2025; Sun & Wang, 2005), but a profoundly spatial one. The “digital turn” in geography demonstrates how digital media and infrastructures produce geographies through, by, and of the digital, reshaping infrastructures, governance, mobilities, and knowledge across scales (Ash et al., 2018; Kitchin, 2014a, 2014b). Recent research further argues for bridging digital geographies with planetary rural thinking (He, 2023), highlighting how digitalisation reshapes rural–urban relations through flows of skills, capital, and practices, while also calling for de-centering urban bias in theorising digital spatialities. Despite the growing studies, most digital geography research focuses on urban contexts or national-level digital infrastructures, while rural contexts are often treated as a passive category and existing studies are fragmented across sectors, particularly in developing economies (Zhang et al., 2023). The spatial mechanisms through which rural digitalisation unfolds remain insufficiently examined. In particular, as digitalisation is driven both by bottom-up adoption and top-down government actions, specifically how resource, market, and policy factors collectively determine digital development outcomes remains unclear.

Tracking and assessing the progress of digital development is crucial for identifying the digital divide between regions, and formulating policies to promote rural digitalisation (Brunori et al., 2022; Kraus et al., 2021). Recent research has proposed a range of theoretical frameworks of digital village development, from the prevailing perspectives of social-cyber-physical interaction, community sustainability and resilience, and economic growth (Lynn et al., 2022; Rijswijk et al., 2021; Roberts, Anderson, et al., 2017).

The measurement of digitalisation progress is not a new concept, with diverse methods and frameworks to calculate the Digital Development Index, incorporating indicators like internet access rates, broadband coverage, ICT-related employment and e-government services (OECD, 2022; Pick & Nishida, 2015; Ruiz-Rodríguez et al., 2018; Stancik & Rohman, 2014). Existing research on digital village development has mainly been conducted in the global scale (OECD, 2014) or in developed countries, such as the USA (Pick et al., 2015), the UK (Philip et al., 2017), Spain (Ruiz-Rodríguez et al., 2018) and Japan (Nishida et al., 2014). However, the measurement of digitalisation in developing regions at the local scale remains underestimated.

In China, one notable approach is the County Digital Rural Index, developed by Peking University New Rural Development Research Institute and the Ali Research Institute, assessing infrastructure, economy, governance, and living standards (New Rural Development Research Institute of Peking University & Alibaba Research Institute, 2022). However, current assessments of digitalisation are dominated by survey and indicator-based approaches, relying primarily on indicators such as infrastructure access, digital usage, and outcomes at provincial level (Chen et al., 2023; Wang, 2024). On one hand, these metrics often aggregate data at broader administrative levels, which may overestimate rural digitalisation due to the influence of urban areas within the same region. On the other hand, more dedicated data are constrained by their spatial coverage. Moreover, while infrastructure indicators capture the availability of digital tools, they do not fully reflect the recent process and efforts of digital village development. This methodological gap presents an opportunity for innovative, data-driven measurement approaches capable of tracing the evolving spatial patterns of rural digitalisation and providing more accurate and dynamic measurements of digital village development.

Additionally, prior research highlights the strong correlation between digitalisation and economic development, with coastal regions exhibiting higher levels of digitalisation than inland areas (Chen et al., 2023; Song et al., 2020; Wen et al., 2023). However, considering recent national and local policy initiatives promoting digital rural development in China, studies on inland regions suggest that this digital divide may be narrowing (Zhang et al., 2021; State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2024). Thus, the evolving impact of China’s National Digital Village Development Strategy in narrowing digital divides remains underexplored. Furthermore, existing analyses largely operate at national or provincial scales and imports urban-derived concepts, overlooking the fine-grained spatial heterogeneity and policy-driven local dynamics that characterise rural digitalisation. There remains limited grounded analysis of how it remaps place-based rural geographies (Salemink et al., 2025), reconfiguring local governance, economic practices, and everyday life through digitalisation, and how these transformations vary within and across rural local communities.

To answer these questions, this paper proposes a big-data-based approach using online news articles. By applying text analysis techniques such as topic recognition and keyword extraction, this method extracts updated information on digital village development achievements at the county level. Media data offers timely, relevant, diverse, and comprehensive datasets that contribute as indicators for assessing social and economic dynamics (Baker et al., 2016; Sarker, 2021), particularly when a social or economic phenomenon is difficult to measure with official statistics. Compared with conventional indicators aggregated at provincial scales, our method offers a complementary tool for understanding rural digitalisation by revealing county-level variations and providing a spatially sensitive lens for evaluating rural development dynamics. This approach not only deepens the understanding of how digitalisation is spatially expressed and governed across rural regions, but also captures ongoing changes in digital village development through up-to-date media data and enables more precise and targeted planning interventions.

In addition to tracking the progress of digital village development, this paper further explores the determinants influencing rural digital technology adoption. China’s rural digitalisation is a mixed efforts of policy initiatives and technology application by local enterprises and individuals. Our study aims to identify the key driving factors, which is also relevant for international audience to understand the multiple driving forces of rural digitalisation.

The paper is organized as follows. Firstly, a literature review in the fields of digital village development and technology adoption is conducted. An analytical framework for the acceptance of digital technology in rural China is then constructed based on the original Technology Acceptance Model. Secondly, the research outlines the steps involved, including data collection, analysis methods and models. A quantitative assessment approach for digital village development is then described, utilizing big data from online news articles encompassing empirical data from 334 prefectures nationwide. Following the analytical framework, regression models are then established, with the results of digital development assessments are set as the dependent variable, and the relevant driving factors serving as independent variables. Thirdly, the paper presents the measurement results of digital village development, depicting its distribution and highlighting geographic differences across regions. The statistical results of running regression models are displayed to reveal the factors associated with digital development in rural China, thus contributing theoretically to understanding the underlying driving forces of digital village development. Finally, we end with a summary and discussions on its contribution to the existing literature, policy implication, limitations and further research.