Local people promote rural tourism via live streaming at Jiache village, Jiabang township in Congjiang county of southwest China's Guizhou province. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By WANG Xiaoxia

"To get rich, build roads first," was a slogan used to develop rural areas in China. Today, various networks are becoming the new roads for villagers to become more prosperous.

China's administrative villages had all been connected to broadband networks by the end of last year, which paves the way for construction of digital villages.

Digital villages, by promoting the application of digital technologies in rural areas, will boost the modernization of agricultural production and public services in rural areas, and narrow the urban-rural development gap.

Smart agriculture and farming

Smart agriculture is reshaping the traditional way of agricultural production from experience-based to data-driven.

At Changping pig farm in Yuqing county, southwest China's Guizhou province, an ear tag with a sensor board is attached to the ear lobe of individual pigs to measure vital parameters and send the data through a smartphone app to the cloud.

The big data system remotely monitors all the pigs on the farm and provides early alerts to the farm caretaker for situation that needs immediate attention.

Previously, the diagnosis of pig diseases could only be made after symptoms emerge, while the optimal treatment period has already been missed, said the farm manager Fei Rufen, adding that with a superior alert system, the survival rate of  last drove of pigs has surpassed 96 percent.

Apart from the production process, digital tools are applied to products circulation, operation and supervision, which help agricultural products flow to the market more freely, increasing villagers' incomes.

In Baoding city, north China's Hebei province, all the villages get access to e-commerce services and the city's rural online retail sales reached 26.3 billion RMB in 2021, while the national volume exceeded two trillion RMB.

    Tractors spray pesticide in the wheat fields in Wanggang Town, Yingshang County of east China's Anhui Province. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

Improvement of public services

The application of digital technology has narrowed the gap between urban and rural areas in terms of healthcare, education and other public services.

Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that all primary and secondary schools (including teaching sites) across the country had broadband access in 2021.

In Baoding, online class connected pupils from rural schools with urban classrooms. "Thanks to the online guidance, my English pronunciation has improved a lot," said Li Zehan from Mingde primary school in Tuonan, a small town in the city.

Telemedicine platforms have been established in 29 provinces, and telemedicine services covered more than 90 percent of Chinese counties, districts and municipalities in 2021, according to the National Health Commission. 

"It used to take at least one day to get to the county's hospital, but now we can receive equal treatment at the township health center," said Wu Yuanming, director of the Jiuzhuang township health center in the mountainous Guizhou.

At present, telemedicine services have covered all public medical institutions in Guizhou, and more than 2.4 million diagnoses have been made through telemedicine since June 2016, said the Guizhou Provincial Health Commission.

The Xi'an district of Mudanjiang city, Heilongjiang province, has built a "smart brain" system to provide farmers with information services on agricultural technology, financial services and product transactions. Meanwhile, the full coverage of monitoring equipment has also supported accurate pandemic prevention.

Refinement of rural governance

Managing rural refuse and natural disasters is another benefit of digital technologies, which have been applied to promoting the rule of law in rural areas, improve rural governance, and enhance self-governance by villagers.

According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MOA), information management and service platforms were established in 78 percent of the counties, and 77 percent of administrative villages were equipped with video monitoring systems, which can provide a cleaner and safer environment for villagers.

On the App, Guizhou Digital Village, you can see the operation of more than 120,000 garbage collection points and nearly 6,000 garbage collection vehicles, covering more than 110,000 villages in Guizhou.

By establishing the smart water conservation system, Guizhou's Xifeng county realized the real-time monitoring of 32 reservoirs and seven rivers to give early alert for floods.

Enterprises are joining in the process. The MOA has signed agreements with enterprises to promote the application of digital platforms and improve rural governance.

Cooperating with the Alibaba Group, Jiaoling county, Guangdong province, has developed a precise governance App based on "credits," which reflect the performance of both governments and villagers, therefore gradually standardizing complex or trivial affairs.