How Did China's Digital Rural Policy Rapidly Diffuse? An Event History Analysis

How to achieve the rapid dissemination of digital rural policies has become an important issue for bridging the digital divide in rural areas and realizing the modernization of agriculture and rural regions. This study adopts a dual perspective of policy adoption and internalization, constructing an analytical framework that includes internal demand pull, local government fiscal capacity to support rural development, central authority push, and intergovernmental competition as internal and external driving factors. It collects and analyzes data on the diffusion of digital rural policies among provincial governments in China from 2018 to 2022, employing event history analysis to explore the influencing factors and potential mechanisms behind the dissemination of digital rural policies in different regions of China.The findings reveal that, first, the diffusion of digital rural policies among provincial governments in China exhibits different outcomes at various stages. During the adoption stage, the diffusion outcomes show convergent characteristics, while in the internalization stage, they display divergent and diverse features. Second, in the process of digital rural policy diffusion, only a small number of provinces synchronized internalization with adoption, whereas most provinces adopted a strategy of first adopting and then internalizing.Third, the driving logic behind local governments' adoption and internalization of digital rural policies shares both commonalities and differences. The common driving forces include the intrinsic motivation brought about by population scale, the vertical authority push from the central government, and the horizontal learning and implicit competitive pressures from peer governments.This indicates that the diffusion of digital rural policies at the provincial level in China is driven by pull mechanisms, coercive mechanisms, learning mechanisms, and competitive mechanisms, with local governments employing competitive strategies in the adoption and internalization of digital rural policies.The differences manifest in that local government capacity is a significant influencing factor for adoption but does not notably impact the sustained advancement of policies, highlighting the important tendency to mobilize various stakeholders and activate resources during the internalization stage. These findings illuminate how digital rural policies can rapidly diffuse in China and provide empirical insights for developing countries to accelerate the dissemination of rural digital policies.