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

The application of digital technologies in rural areas has improved the rural economy and overall development. China places significant emphasis on rural digitalisation, implementing the Digital Village Development Strategy to drive rural revitalization in recent years. Nonetheless, the evolving impacts of digital village development policy remain underexplored, and existing metrics based on traditional indicators may overestimate rural digitalisation by aggregating data at broader administrative levels, thereby obscuring local variations and recent policy-driven effects. To address this, this paper first proposes a quantitative method based on big data from news articles as a new and high-precision data source to measure the digital development in rural China. Using text analysis of 110,000 related reports from mainstream media websites, we derived assessment scores for 334 prefecture-level administrative units across various rural areas of digital development. Furthermore, this paper proposed an analytical framework tailored to the rural context, integrating both technology adoption ability (including digital infrastructure, economic development level and science and education level), and technology adoption motivations (including agricultural importance and local government attention). The study reveals significant progress not only in coastal regions but also in inland and north-eastern China, indicating a more distributed and diversifies pattern across the country. The findings highlight that digital village development is mainly driven by regional science and technology resources and local government attention as a supplementary factor. These findings enrich the dialogue in digital geography and emphasize the need for place-based and targeted strategies to foster digital inclusion in rural regions.