Promoting Common Prosperity through Digital Rural Development: An Institutional Study

Abstract

Common prosperity is the essential requirement of Chinese-style modernization. The most arduous and challenging tasks in promoting common prosperity remain in rural areas. As digital technologies increasingly extend into rural regions, digital rural development has become an important pathway for narrowing the urban–rural gap and advancing rural transformation. Existing studies have primarily focused on technological empowerment and practical approaches, but lack systematic exploration of the institutional logic behind this process. This study adopts an institutional perspective, incorporating the characteristics of grassroots governance with Chinese features, and constructs a tripartite analytical framework—policy supply, institutional arrangement, and grassroots governance—to examine the institutional foundation through which digital rural development contributes to common prosperity. The findings suggest that digital initiatives in rural areas, through effective institutional supply, organizational embedding, and normative incentives, facilitate the digital transformation of agriculture and rural governance, and improve the accessibility and equity of basic public services. This provides institutional support for achieving the goal of common prosperity. However, challenges such as institutional fragmentation, capacity imbalance, and misaligned incentives still persist. To address these issues, this paper proposes enhancing cross-sector coordination, strengthening grassroots governance capacity, and improving incentive systems to ensure that digital dividends in rural areas are fairly distributed and embedded within an institutionalized framework.