Digital platforms and AI tools are bridging the distance for China's migrant rural residents, fostering participation and governance in the countryside

As the waves of urbanization and industrialization surge forward, rural development and vitalization become a shared mission for nations worldwide. The effective utilization of digital technology can play a pivotal role in this mission by mitigating collective action dilemmas and governance vacuums caused by population outflow in rural areas.

China's newly released outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) for national social and economic development explicitly calls for deepening the construction of a digital China and enhancing the level of digital-intelligent development, while the 2026 No 1 Central Document highlights the implementation of high-quality development actions for digital villages.

According to the 57th Statistical Report on China's Internet Development, 5G networks cover all towns and 95 percent of administrative villages in China, with rural internet penetration reaching 69.5 percent as of December 2025. The digital landscape in rural China has leaped forward over the past decade, accumulating valuable experience for combating rural development challenges and fostering revitalization.

On the one hand, the widespread adoption of digital rural governance platforms connects the floating population online, solving the problem of insufficient participation in rural governance.

Spatial barriers and spatiotemporal dislocation were once core issues hindering the cohesion of mobile societies. However, digital technology has broken these shackles, allowing discrete mobile forces to converge online.

For instance, as of March 2026, over 88,000 villages and 16 million villagers nationwide have joined the"village-level service platform", a digital governance mini-program.

On this rural office automation system, every village has a dedicated home page featuring columns for village affairs disclosure, deliberation and consultation, grievance feedback and participation rankings.

Villagers working or living anywhere in the world can follow their home village's page on their phones to stay updated on local dynamics. They can participate online in the consultation, decision-making and supervision of public affairs such as infrastructure construction, public service provision and collective resource management, and are incentivized to actively donate to collective activities that improve their hometowns.

On the other hand, digital-intelligent tools represented by large language models deeply empower grassroots cadres, effectively helping them govern villages and meet villagers' needs. By December 2025, the user base for generative artificial intelligence in China had reached 602 million.

A 2025 survey by the China Institute for Rural Studies at Tsinghua University showed that 66.9 percent of village cadres now use AI tools such as Doubao and DeepSeek in their daily work to assist with decision-making and management. They utilize these tools to design public activity plans, produce promotional videos for local specialty products, draft rural revitalization project proposals and analyze data on public demands.

However, integrating digital technology into rural society is a complex process that is currently in a"running-in period", facing multiple constraints regarding subject capability, technology application and institutional norms.

First, the digital literacy of rural cadres and villagers needs improvement. According to a 2026 report by China Internet Network Information Center, as of December 2025, the digital literacy and skills of rural residents lagged behind those of urban residents by 24.6 percentage points. China Institute for Rural Studies data from 2025 indicates that 31.1 percent of village cadres can barely use office software, and 10.3 percent do not know how to use WeChat to issue notices or mobilize the public.

Second, the misuse of digital governance tools is prominent. The redundant construction of various digital governance tools is severe; most villages are required to fill out data for more than a score of apps, with some exceeding dozens. This leads to"digital burnout" among cadres, affecting their physical and mental health and their willingness to serve the public.

Third, lagging regulation has spawned a series of social risks. Government regulation often trails behind the iteration of digital technology, leading to increasing social risks in rural areas such as information cocoons, group polarization and even AI fraud. These risks can easily erode villagers' trust in digital technology.

The 15th Five-Year Plan emphasizes the importance of creating a beneficial, safe and fair environment in the development of digital technology. Given that high mobility will be a long-term structural feature of China's rural society, future digital transformation needs to accelerate into a new stage of high-quality development to provide continuous momentum for reversing rural decline and promoting comprehensive revitalization.

First, rural revitalization hinges on human resources. This means increased investment in improving the digital literacy and skills of villagers, implementing special actions to enhance the digital leadership of rural grassroots cadres and carrying out customized cultivation in digital services, governance, mobilization and marketing.

Second, technology is key to vigorously promoting innovation in digital governance tools. There should be increased research support for agriculture-friendly digital technology innovation to improve the utility and ease of use of rural digital governance platforms. The construction of an intelligent, standardized rural governance platform system should be accelerated, making digital platforms a smart hub that truly transcends time and space to efficiently aggregate rural resources.

Third, institutional backup is needed to strengthen the standardized management of digital applications. This includes adhering to the principle of balancing regulation and support, strengthening the governance of false and harmful information in cyberspace, and building an agile and efficient digital governance institutional system. Equally important are algorithmic value orientation and humanistic care, ultimately promoting technology for good to provide institutional guarantees for cohesion in a mobile society.

The author is an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy and Management and a research assistant at the China Institute for Rural Studies at Tsinghua University.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.