Accelerate the improvement of digital rural construction level

Recently, the Ministry of Commerce and nine other departments issued the "Three Year Action Plan for County level Commerce", which requires the establishment of a rural commercial system with county towns as the center, townships as the focus, and villages as the foundation. By 2025, we will build around 500 leading county-level commercial counties nationwide, and construct and renovate a number of county-level logistics and distribution centers, township commercial centers, and new rural convenience stores. Promote digital applications in rural areas, extend the entire process from sales front-end to procurement, inventory, distribution, etc., and accelerate the digital transformation of rural construction. This action plan indicates that digital technology is changing the rural landscape of China. Building a digital rural development system and creating a new model for digital rural development is a key way to achieve the rural revitalization strategy and an effective carrier for promoting increased production and income for farmers. It will provide strong impetus and opportunities for agricultural and rural development.

There are two main models for examining the path of digital rural construction in China: technology empowerment and administrative leadership. The former emphasizes the use of the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies to shape smart agriculture, e-commerce economy, digital industry and other emerging formats, build digital agricultural platforms, environmental remote sensing monitoring platforms, urban and rural social digital governance platforms and other digital economic aggregates, and lay the foundation for the development of rural digital economy. The latter is led by the government, which formulates local rural digital transformation policies and establishes specialized guidance departments as organizational support. Adopting visual supervision and refined services, encouraging enterprises and diverse social forces to participate in the construction of digital rural areas. Dispatching cadres to villages and introducing professional and technical talents to form "technical backbone" to sink into rural society, in order to promote the speed of digital rural construction.

Two paths have effectively promoted the digital transformation of rural economic and social development. However, there are still urgent problems that need to be overcome in the path driven mainly by external inputs.

One is the "suspension" in resource allocation. Despite the continuous input of resources from the country to rural areas, in reality, many villagers are flocking to cities for work, resulting in a hollowing out of the rural structure due to population outflow. Many villagers lack enthusiasm and enthusiasm to participate in public affairs, resulting in limited progress in digital rural construction and difficulty in bridging the "last mile" of urban-rural integration development.

Secondly, the agency of the subject is to some extent squeezed out. Currently, digital technology has a high threshold, which limits the effective participation of villagers. On the one hand, insufficient education and technological capabilities have resulted in many rural groups being excluded from the digital technology barrier. On the other hand, local governments often prioritize completing short-term performance evaluation tasks, neglecting the long-term sustainable development and institutionalized cultivation of digital rural construction.

Thirdly, there is a regional gap in development performance. The "County Digital Rural Index" released by Peking University in 2022 proposes that China's digital rural construction has achieved initial results, but still faces problems such as low level of economic digitization, large regional differences, overlapping digital and economic divide, and insufficient benefits for the people from new industries. The top five provinces on the top 100 counties are all located in the eastern region. Both technological empowerment and government leadership are to some extent constrained by the population structure and economic and social development level of the region.

The above-mentioned problems are partly due to the neglect of the main role of rural construction, namely the cultivation of digital capabilities among villagers. In the future, there is an urgent need to improve the overall level of digital rural construction, strengthen the digital capabilities of villagers, and bridge the digital gap between urban and rural residents.

The cultivation of digital capabilities includes the ability to operate digital devices, integrate digital information, and maintain digital security. The ability to operate digital equipment means that villagers can access all kinds of technology and commodity information through the Internet at any time. The government realizes the effective connection of "Internet plus education" by starting digital classroom. Through live streaming and course recording push, we aim to bring renowned teachers into rural areas, improve training courses, and embed employment and entrepreneurship platforms to help villagers adapt to this change. This helps to change the way villagers obtain information, promote the informatization and digitization process of agricultural production, expand agricultural product sales from offline to online, improve agricultural output, deepen e-commerce development, and improve the economic benefits of digital rural construction.

Digital information integration capability refers to the government's ability to enhance the digital integration of farmers in fields such as finance, online shopping, and social networking. By building a digital service platform for information public, we aim to help farmers learn how to use e-commerce big data, open up product circulation channels, accurately match goods supply and demand, build logistics distribution stations with "one town, one station, one village, one point", improve agricultural product supply, prevent overcapacity, promote the intelligent transformation of rural e-commerce to digital commerce, and enhance the commercial benefits of digital rural construction.

The ability to maintain digital security focuses on improving the digital security literacy of farmers. Through policy guidance, we will build an innovation platform, independently cultivate local information security maintenance talents, and form a special assistance model for high-quality talents to drive rural security development. Timely grasp rural emergencies, stabilize supply and demand expectations, improve prevention and emergency command capabilities, fill the gaps in rural information governance, and enhance the public security benefits of digital rural construction.