The Digital Rural in China: Rurality, Urban-Rural Relations, and Aesthetics

This dissertation investigates how digital technologies mediate rural spatialities in China, addressing the growing need to theorize the digital transformation of rural spaces. While digital geographies have extensively examined how spatiality is reshaped by digital technologies, business models, and practices in urban contexts, this subdiscipline has paid limited attention to rural contexts. Concurrently, rural studies have increasingly called for a reconceptualization of rural space that acknowledges diverse socio-cultural and material dynamics, yet they have not fully engaged with digital technologies as active agents in these transformations. To bridge these two strands of scholarship, this research examines how digital technologies reconfigure rural spatial formations through three interrelated dimensions: (1) the evolving conceptualizations of rurality; (2) the reshaping of rural-urban relations; and (3) the transformation of visual aesthetics and sensory experiences of rural places. The study focuses empirically on rural spaces in the Guangzhou area of Guangdong Province, China. It draws on both secondary and primary data. Primary data were collected during six months of fieldwork involving unobtrusive observation, aimed at examining how digital technologies shape rural environments and practices across selected sites. Secondary sources include academic literature, policy documents, and media reports related to digital rural development, as well as user-generated reviews from a major Chinese digital platform. Findings demonstrate that digital technologies play a constitutive role in shaping contemporary rurality, transforming not only rural economies but also rural aesthetics, social relations, and spatial imaginaries. They enable new forms of visual and sensory engagement with rural space, particularly through social media, e-commerce, and smart agriculture initiatives. Moreover, digital technologies reconfigure rural-urban relationships by attracting urban capital (human and investment), informing the expansion of rural landscapes at the urban-rural interface, and emplacing rural material interfaces within urban environments. These entanglements challenge static understandings of rural space and underscore the importance of conceptualizing rural spatiality as dynamic and digitally mediated. In doing so, this research contributes to decentering urban-centric perspectives in digital geographies and foregrounds rural agency in shaping spatial transformations in the digital age.