As the construction of China’s digital village continues, exploring the trends of television media use among rural residents’ information access channels is conducive to a systematic study of intergenerational differences in television media use and their evolutionary patterns among rural residents in China. This study is based on the national sample survey data from the China General Social Survey from 2012 to 2021 and analysed using the Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction Model (APC-I) model. It is found that TV use in rural China shows a triple differentiation of age-dominate life cycle, period-reflect technological impact and cohort-engrave with policy imprint. It shows a generational gradient of ‘elderly dependency, middle-age smoothness, youth substitution’. This evolution is driven by a combination of policy-enforced popularisation and household life cycle. Based on the above findings, the study suggests mitigating intergenerational differentiation, optimising content provision, promoting media convergence and providing policy support to facilitate equitable distribution and efficient use of rural media resources and to further promote inclusiveness and social equity in information dissemination.
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