by Wilfred Yang Wang, Yu Sun, and Linlin Li
Sun, Y., Wang, W. Y., & Li, L. (2026). Rating villagers’ morality: Techno-moral governance via a data scoring system in rural China. Big Data & Society, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517261424163 (Original work published 2026)
With digital technologies applied in rural governance, everyday utilities and service delivery are digitised and datafied, creating new forms of order and structure of everyday practices in rural China. With the embeddedness of data, algorithms and platforms in every settings, governments strive to make automated and ‘smart’ technologies at the centre of its rural governance and social controls.
This article develops a framework of techno-moral governance to capture the emerging forms of datafied governance in China. We take techno-moral governance as a critical approach to examine how infrastructural arrangements intersect with moral assessment in shaping governing techniques, practices and vision in and beyond rural China.
Using the case of the smartphone app, Xiangcun Ding, which is deployed in rural areas of Zhejiang province , we draw on fieldwork data collected during our ethnographic visits across 10 villages in Jiande county to explore the operation of the data scoring system of Xiangcun Ding as a national example of datafied rural governance. We tried to unravel how the state’s ideologies of governance and discourse of morality and civilization are built into the material characteristics and functions of technology and how the techno-moral governance operates on the basis of the embedded material-discursive nexus in rural China.
Our argument is threefold. First, while the app operates on the seemingly automated algorithmic calculation to assess individuals’ morality, its deployment and operational efficiency rely on the ‘co-opting’ supervision between the administrative power of local governments and Alibaba’s techno-corporate supports. Second, the new data scoring system found its legitimacy from the socialist legacies of the work point (gongfen) system, which was practiced in Mao’s era, as part of its major functional features to encourage and mobilize uptake and acceptance of the new technology. Third, by immersing itself in local social infrastructures and everyday lives, Xiangcun Ding plays a critical role in normalising and justifying the datafication of lives and expanding the boundaries of social governance and control.
The lens of techno-moral governance in rural areas allows us to shift our focus to reconfiguration of social material lives and relations through data technologies, beyond a liner focus on the construction of discursive politics, which has dominated our understanding of digital governance that focuses on urban China. Thus, we suggest that it is necessary to look at both the material and the discursive process and their composite to understand the complex dynamics of China’s internet governance and the emerging datafied approaches to governance.
