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Abstract

This article attempts to develop the techno-moral governance approach to critically examine the expansion of moral governance infrastructure in rural China, where data media technologies are deployed to experiment with a new form of social governance. Since 2020, the state has promoted the use of data scoring systems as an effective way to enhance rural governance. Using the smartphone app Xiangcun Ding, deployed in rural areas of Zhejiang province as a case study, we draw on fieldwork data collected in Jiande to explore the operation of Xiangcun Ding's data scoring system as a national example of digital rural governance. By analysing the algorithmic construction and nudging of villagers’ social morality, we argue that the data-scoring system has become a new moral governing infrastructure that has enabled and been embedded in the government's expanding capacity to manage everyday life in rural China. Focusing on techno-moral governance in rural settings allows critical inquiry to move beyond the construction of discursive politics, which has dominated scholarship on digital governance in urban China, to examine the reconfiguration of social material lives and relations through data technologies.

Keywords

Automation datafied governance data scoring system algorithms everyday life rural China

Introduction

Political governance and ideological control have been increasingly conducted through platform media, especially in the authoritarian state of China. There has been ongoing scholarly interest in the Party State's ability and ambition to incorporate digital platform media to discipline the physical body, social behaviours and personal morality of Chinese people. Digital media have become a new means of ideological construction that aims to make high-quality citizens and promote spiritual civilization among the population (Keane and Su, 2019). Moral goodness and social orderliness have long been considered the major concerns of China's social governance with internet technologies (Cui and Wu, 2016).

Digital platforms have been deployed to frame the ideal citizen through constant digital nudging and content pushing (algorithmic recommendations), guiding Chinese users to follow expected moral codes and ‘civilized behaviours’ (Keane and Su, 2019; Liang and Chen, 2022). New digital technologies have also afforded the Chinese government opportunities to develop various social control techniques, ranging from public shaming to the social labelling of individuals deemed to have breached the moral codes or engaged in uncivilized behaviours (Chen and Grossklags, 2022). The rise of China's ‘social credit system’, which is assisted by a sophisticated data processing system to evaluate and rank citizen's public and private behaviours (Liang et al., 2018), has greatly expanded the scope to monitor and discipline individuals’ everyday life, and put ‘social quantification’ at the centre of governance (Yu, 2022).

As the above two modalities are about the symbolic aspiration (the mode of good citizen) and discipline (fear of being punished), the emerging form of data-driven governance shape citizen's behaviours and their sense of moral standards through organizing citizens’ material utilities of everyday lives. Such a governing technique is especially obvious in areas and on social issues that the governments have failed to or have been struggling to deliver such as ageing (see Wang, 2021), urban mobility (Chen and Qiu, 2019) and youth behaviours (Chen and Yang, 2023), to maintain social order and stability. These modalities of social control subject individuals to the state's ethical and moral standards, which are measured and monitored by digital technologies (Chen and Yang, 2023). The entanglement between technologies, morality ranking, and the governance of behaviours in public and private lives is documented in the recent literature on China's COVID-19 health code and tracing app as an emerging form of biopolitical governance and control (Sun and Wang, 2022; Yu, 2022). Shaping and managing citizen's recognition of the state-endorsed moral codes and preferred behaviours have been centric to China's evolving social governance and population control (Wang, 2021).

This article develops a techno-moral governance framework grounded in the local experience of implementing a moral ranking app in Jiande County, Zhejiang Province. Drawing on this case, we critically examine how infrastructural arrangements intersect with moral assessments to shape everyday life in rural China. Our focus on rural China stems not only from the state's framing of digital technologies as instruments for addressing structural challenges, such as poverty alleviation, enhancing agricultural productivity, and reducing the rural–urban divide (Ren, 2023; L. Zhao, 2023; Y. Zhao, 2023), but also from its historical role as a critical site for policy experimentation and the development of novel governance techniques (Heilmann, 2008). By focusing on the development of a governmental platform, the Xiangcun Ding app, and its implementation in Jiande County, Zhejiang Province, we evaluate the state's material arrangements for building social infrastructure for moral governance. As of April 2021, the app was adopted by 239 villages in Jiande, and it reached 142,600 active users with at least one person per household registered on the app¹. The implementation of techno-moral governance is situated within the Party-State's evolving political and social governance in relation to the advancement of data-driven media in China. As one of the first national pilot demonstration units for the digitalization of rural governance, Jiande County in Zhejiang Province led the way in using a points-based system to promote moral governance (China Daily, 2020).

In doing so, we hope to unpack the complex entanglement between the state's social governance and the app's technological affordances and operation in fulfilling the political visions. Taking a closer look at ‘the social’ (Liu, 2022: 3), the ‘everyday experiences and practices’ (Y. Zhao, 2023: 8) and the ‘interchange between the system and the lifeworld’ (Yu, 2022: 1) in datafied society, this article pays attention to the local, social, cultural and political contexts in which techno-moral governance is experimented. It aims to further explore the algorithmic construction of morality as a governing approach to understand the dynamics of techno-moral governance in rural China. By drawing on fieldwork data, we first investigate the algorithmic imagination of morality that is framed to promote national ideologies and support local governance. Then, we further studies how algorithmic ranking of morality has been institutionalized as a new strategic tool for governance and control in the rural area of Zhejiang province.

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 by local governments with 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 practised 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 normalizing and justifying the datafication of lives and expanding the boundaries of social governance and control. Taking indigenous perspectives, this article sheds light on the imaginaries and practices of techno-moral governance as new techniques to civilize the rural population in authoritarian China. By highlighting the sociopolitical and sociocultural context of digital infrastructure building in rural China, it sheds new lights on the digital infrastructuralization of social governance and everyday lives in China (Sun and Wang, 2022; Plantin and de Seta, 2019; Liang et al., 2018; Z. Zhang, 2021).

The rise of techno-moral governance in China

Understanding moral governance

The term moral governance offers important conceptual and analytical interventions to understand how digital media have afforded new governing techniques and practices. The theoretical root of moral governance can be traced to Foucault's work on governmentality (2008), which refers to ‘self-governing’ as the art of governing beyond the formal apparatus of the state. Self-governing does not indicate agentic autonomy. Quite the opposite, Foucault (2008) uses the concept to understand how individuals internalize norms and govern themselves. Power, in this view, operates through the self's regulation of itself around ethical codes, where individuals are constituted as moral subjects (O’Leary, 2002). Rather than seeing morality as imposed solely from above, Foucault (1994) emphasizes ethics as techniques of self-constitution, defined by four analytic dimensions: ethical substance (what part of the self is problematized), mode of subjection (why one adheres to moral obligations), forms of elaboration (what practices are used), and telos (the ultimate aim of ethical self-work). His analysis of the panopticon illustrates the shift from externally imposed discipline to internalized self-surveillance. Situated in the context of liberal democracy, Foucault observed how states and institutions rely on the invisible power, which is diffused and embodied in discourse and knowledge and are internalized and obscured in everyday lives (Larkin, 2013). While recognizing the historical and structural distinctions, the diffusion and internalization of the state's power in China have been achieved through the dominant discourse of morality.

A brief history of China's moral governance

Morality has long been central to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) political narrative, serving as a source of ruling legitimacy since Mao's era (Thornton, 2007). The integration of Confucian-inspired moral virtue (德) with Party ideology has evolved through distinct phases. A key shift came under Deng Xiaoping, when the discourse of suzhi (素质)—emphasizing personal spiritual and behavioural qualities – emerged in the 1980s to align individual conduct with national goals (Kipnis, 2007; Kubat, 2018). As economic reforms granted more individual autonomy, suzhi became a moral narrative to sustain Party legitimacy beyond Marxist orthodoxy.

In the 1990s, Jiang Zemin formalized morality within legal structures, while Hu Jintao embedded it into the vision of a harmonious society (hexie shehui 和谐社会) amid rising unrest (Lin, 2017; O’Brien and Li, 2006). Trevaskes (2024) frames these efforts as ‘social management’ (shehui guanli 社会管理), which remained top-down despite their moral tone. Xi Jinping's leadership marks a turning point: morality now functions as a central regulatory force rather than a supplement to law. Xi fuses traditional values with state ideology, positioning morality at the core of political governance (Xi, 2022). Unlike in liberal democracies, where the state governs indirectly through the internalization of norms via decentralized institutions (Foucault, 2008), the CCP presents itself as an exemplar of moral virtue (Bakken, 2000). As Delia Lin (2017) argues, the Party-state has not shied away from overtly promoting, regulating, and continually reinventing the everyday self-governing of its citizens. This is most clearly articulated through the discourse of suzhi and the broader civilizational ideal of wenming (文明), which encompasses not only behaviour and appearance but also mindset, emotional expression, and ideological alignment.

Under Xi, moral governance is institutionalized via civic-moral education, morality banks, and digital scoring systems that reinforce conformity and ideological loyalty (Trevaskes, 2024). Rather than relying on the internalized freedom of the liberal subject, China's model is explicitly moralizing the society and collectivist, positioning the Party-state as the moral arbiter. Reinforcing the Party's claim to moral and political leadership in both public and private life allows the Chinese government to navigate social tension and manage dissents and thus legitimize its power monopoly and rule (Ding and Javed, 2021).

In practice, moral governance operates as a ‘dynamic co-governance partnership’ in China, another major difference with the western tradition of self-governance, which involves both the central state delegating the duties and power to local and grassroots actors, such as volunteering stations and neighbourhood units (jie dao) (Trevaskes, 2024: 39). The co-governance model strives to maximize the monitoring and shaping of citizens’ behaviour in accordance with Party-defined norms.

Governing with technologies

The rise of digital media technologies has provided the Chinese state with new capacity to expand and reinvent its moral governance strategies and techniques (Cui and Wu, 2016; Keane and Su, 2019). Scholars of Chinese internet and platform governance have distinguished between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ regulatory approaches, which target both online and offline behaviours (Yang, 2017). While the central government continues to deploy hardline tactics such as censorship and content suppression (MacKinnon, 2009; Wright, 2014; King et al., 2013, 2017; Liu and Zhao, 2021), it has also delegated aspects of governance to local and non-state actors, adopting softer techniques that incentivize citizens to conform through encouragement, rewards, and behavioural nudges (Engelen and Nys, 2020; Byrne et al., 2022; Wernbacher et al., 2020). The ‘softer’ approach indicates that the state has utilized digital media to develop localized and individualized interventions to enhance the effectiveness of targeted social management to anticipate and mitigate potential unrests (Schlæger and Jiang, 2014).

More recently, data-driven predictive technologies have become key to the state's practice in instilling citizens’ values and behaviours. Bruckermann (2024) describes how the state promotes moral virtue through digital platforms such as Ant Forest, which gamifies eco-friendly behaviours and rewards users for actions like walking or reducing energy consumption, launched by Ant Financial Group, a subsidiary of the tech giant Alibaba. The platform encourages and supervises citizens to internalize state-defined moral standards through habitual, seemingly voluntary practices. Bruckermann's analysis reveals a significant shift: morality has also become central to the governance of digital technologies themselves. Digital platforms now serve as the critical actors to build and maintain infrastructures of moral shaping and subjectification. Such a project not only involves ideological alignment but also material construction and control of existing and new techno-social systems (Z. Zhang, 2021). Moreover, the development of these infrastructures often requires collaboration with private industry (such as Alibaba), a well-established strategy for addressing complex local issues beyond the reach of state actors (Chen and Qiu, 2019). Hence, the state is no longer regulating platform from a distance but emerged as a co-designer of digital governance and actively shaping the moral architecture of everyday life (Sun and Wang, 2022).

Techno-moral governance

Drawing on the respective scholarly understandings of digital governance and moral governance, which have evolved distinctively, our attempt to synthesize them goes beyond a simple reference to the digitization of everyday lives. Instead, we hope to provide a framework to examine the transformation of governing techniques and approaches from above. From there, we are not only trying to describe the existing techniques and practices of moral governance but also to envisage the vision of governance in an anticipated digital future. There are several principles underlining China's techno-moral governance.

Firstly, techno-moral governance is rooted in China's ongoing efforts to regulate morality. It builds on the principle of positioning the Party State as both the leader and exemplar of social morality. This symbolism is crucial, as it shapes the core logic of techno-moral governance. Accordingly, its operation has involved multiple actors including both local and non-state actors, now evolved into an expanded group that prioritizes technology companies and platform operators. Rather than collaborating on equal terms, co-opting involves appropriating others’ resources and input to serve the Party State's interests. As technology companies now occupy the frontline of communication and information circulation, they are tasked with monitoring and upholding moral standards on behalf of the state. While local and non-state actors are granted certain powers, they are also expected to align with central directives, while adapting their practices to reflect local characteristics (Schneider, 2018).

Further, digital technologies have afforded the state to materialize the production, management and legitimation of the abstract moral principles through building infrastructures supporting platform architecture, algorithmic settings and data flows (Liang et al., 2018). Technological infrastructures such as smart devices, facial recognition, AI and cloud computing have expanded the spatiotemporal scale of everyday governance. Spaces (such as private spaces and bodies) and time, once outside the domain of governance, can now be monitored (Plantin and de Seta, 2019) and even intervened in (such as the forced isolation during COVID-19, see Sun and Wang, 2022). Further, new digital and automated technologies are increasingly built into existing infrastructures such as utilities and social services, where citizens are required to activate their digital profiles to access various services (Chen and Qiu, 2019). Increasingly, governing these material aspects of lives allow the state to gain direct access in shaping people's behaviours and standardizing social norm (Keane and Su, 2019).

Lastly, co-opting with key technology actors is an important feature of the collaborative governing model. Techno-moral governance signals a new trend or political ambition of the Party State to limit the autonomy of local state and non-state actors in executing its policy directives and ideological agenda. This ambition was evident during COVID-19 governance, which aimed to unify and construct national compliance and response to the pandemic (Yu and Zeuthen, 2023; Sun and Wang, 2022).

As a conceptual framework to examine the state's power orchestration, ideology manifestation and political will, we are not saying that techno-moral governance has been fully realized. Indeed, research over time has shown that local fragmentations (Sun and Wang, 2022) and citizens’ agentic creativity (Kloet and Poell, 2025) remain largely present in China's digital authoritarianism. Nonetheless, the framework can illustrate the broader ambition and ongoing determination of the Party-State in harnessing digital technology to shape citizens’ subjectivity and daily behaviours. Ensuring that they align with a range of moral expectations established by the state. Techno-moral governance is, hence, an ethos of the Party-state to respond to technological transformation. Analysing the extent to which this ambition has been achieved offers important insights into the power dynamics between the Party, market players such as tech companies, and local state and non-state actors in the digital future.

As the state's power is increasingly embedded in the techno-material space, the everyday space has become a new domain for internet governance and control. We thus argue that it is necessary to examine both the material and discursive processes, and their composite, to comprehensively understand the complex dynamics of China's internet governance and the emerging datafied approaches to governance. Then, how the state's ideologies of governance and its 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 becomes an important topic worthy of critical inquiry in the age of big data.

Methodology

The case: data scoring system in Xiangcun Ding

Xiangcun Ding (乡村钉, a smart app for rural users) is a digital platform of administrative cooperation co-developed by Alibaba Corporation and the local government of Jiande County, a sub-prefecture-level city under the administration of Hangzhou. The app is part of the Hangzhou government's ambition to build smart villages to connect the local governments and villagers in alignment with the principles of ‘joint contribution and co-governance’, which is the core of China's rural revitalization policies. As a pioneer of China's digital reform, local governments in Zhejiang Province initiated the ‘One Visit at Most’ administrative reform in 2017, aiming to enhance the efficiency of administrative services. Inheriting the pioneering spirit of digital reform in Zhejiang Province, the local government of Jiande introduced Xiangcun Ding, a smartphone-based app developed by Alibaba, in July 2020 to advance its goal of smart rural governance, which is also part of the national experimental process of digital rural governance. The app has been widely used among villagers, as local governments are moving their social welfare services to the app. In each village, one person from each household has registered on the app, and people working in cities are registered remotely. The app has also been redesigned to enhance usability for older adults.

Building on the functions of Xiangcun Ding, the Jiande government incorporated a data scoring system, which was named Ding Gongfen (钉·功分, Ding score), into the app in its effort to integrate the local culture and practices into the digital model of governance. Improving morality among local population is one of the major goals of the digital village project. Moreover, the local government of Jiande has designed Ding Gongfen and Xiangcun Ding app as a national experimental project in response to the state's digital village plans to advance technology-driven rural development and live up to rural revitalization (He et al., 2025; Zhang and Chen, 2024). Since Jiande was selected as one of the pilot counties for the construction of the national rural governance system in December 2019 (Zhang and Chen, 2024), the local government has been working to develop the Xiangcun Ding app as a national exemplar for digital rural governance. Recognized as a successful experiment, Jiande's experience with digital governance through the data scoring system has already been adopted in other provinces. To highlight Jiande's pioneering role and its success in promoting the digitalization of rural governance through Xiangcun Ding, Jiande government renamed the Xiangcun Ding app to Jiancun Ding in 2022. Since then, it has been widely used as a tool for moral governance in villages in Jiande County (Jiande News Online, 2025). Taking Jiande as an example, a similar version of the data scoring system has been put into use in village governance at Yufeng Township of Liuchou in Guangxi Province (Yufeng Qu Government news, 2024).

Research methods

From April 2021 to October 2022, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork to learn about the deployment of the data scoring system Ding Gongfen inserted into Xiangcun Ding app. We took three trips to villages in Jiande County to investigate the making of the app, and the practices of moral assessment as a technique of governance in rural China.

During our three ethnographic visits, we participated in 11 ‘Zuotan Hui’ (a type of meeting in which officials convene a roundtable discussion to seek feedback from experts and researchers) with officials from villages and other institutions. During those Zuotan meetings, we spoke with 19 people in total (see Table 1), including two municipal officials responsible for the program and 17 grassroots village cadres from 10 villages. The officials introduced the app to us, and we then asked them questions to learn about the system's structural operation and the governing approach and practices regarding Ding Gongfen. Our conversations were guided by the following inquiries: (1) the popularity of the data scoring system, (2) its technical operation, and (3) how villagers’ everyday behaviours are rated by the system. During our ethnographic visits, the moderators of the app demonstrated to us how Xiangcun Ding and its built-in Ding Gongfen app operate, allowing us to gain a glimpse of its technical features and affordances.

Table 1.

The list of Zuotan meetings.

No.	Village or institution name	Officials we talked to at the meetings	No. of officials
1	Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs	Vice Director and Division Chief	2
2	Songkou Village at Sandu Township	Village Party Branch Secretary and Secretary Assistant	3
3	Zhentou Dadui	Chief director of the Cultural Hall	1
4	Xinye Village at Daciyan Township	Village Party Branch Secretary and Head of the Town	2
5	Shang Wufang Village at Daciyan Township	Village Party Branch Secretary	1
6	Shuangquan Village at Daciyan Township	Village Party Branch Secretary, Street Office Director	2
7	Pengjia Village at Hangtou Township	Head of the Town, Village Party Branch Secretary and Secretary Assistant	3
8	Yutang Village at Hangtou Township	Village Party Branch Secretary	1
9	Qianhe Village at Meicheng Township	Village Party Branch Secretary	1
10	Gaoheng Village at Dayang Township	Village Party Branch Secretary and Head of the Town	2
11	Hangchuan Village at Hangtou Township	Village Party Branch Secretary	1

In addition to the minutes of Zuotan meetings, we drew on policy documents to understand the policy landscape of the digital village project in Jiande. Jiande Government provided four local policy documents, and we obtained two national policy documents from government websites to supplement our observations and ethnographic notes. Based on the minutes of meetings, observations, and policy documents from the primary fieldwork, we have learnt the state's motivations, policy orientation, and technological imaginaries in the design and development of the app. During our second and third fieldwork, we revisited the villages we had visited and extended our field trip to other villages, which presented diverse features in the local use of the data-scoring system in moral governance. Guided by the theoretical discussion of techno-moral governance, we employed a qualitative thematic analysis of ethnographic notes and policy documents, and identified two central themes in our empirical data: the algorithmic imagination of morality and the institutionalization of the algorithmic assessment of morality. By combining thematic analysis of textual messages with on-site ethnographic observations, we examine the rationale of techno-moral governance and its operation in everyday life through Xiangcun Ding and Ding Gongfen. Based on this, we aim to investigate how algorithmic measurement of morality, supported by a data scoring system, is institutionalized within the bureaucratic process, thereby operating as part of the social institutions that govern villagers’ everyday lives.

Imagining a bigger sense of rural morality

Morality in rural China is not only confined to moral values but is also associated with many norms and traditions. A larger part of morality, including ideological claims, is imagined and built into Xiangcun Ding's technical design and operational arrangement to support the national and local ideologies of governance.

A major function of the Xiangcun Ding app, Ding Gongfen (Figure 1), was implemented by the local government of Jiande to mobilize mass participation in public affairs at the village level. The data scoring system is used to rate villagers’ morality or civility by tracking their daily activities and engagement in village affairs. In other words, the social rating system is to determine whether a person is a good villager behaving in accordance with moral codes by categorizing and assessing one's daily behaviours. As manifested by the name of the data scoring system ‘Ding Gongfen’, it is established based on the historical legacy of the work point system (gongfen zhi 工分制) that was practised in rural cooperatives (hezuoshe) in the socialist era. The work point system was innovated and adopted in rural China to mobilize villagers to work hard in collective farming. Villagers need to earn points, which can be redeemed for rewards such as money, food, basic necessities, and other material goods. It was ‘a system of quantifying daily labour and allocating consumer goods in the rural countryside against the background of dramatic changes to ownership and work after 1949’ (Ghosh, 2025, p. 147). Inheriting the socialist traditions of collectivization and cooperation in Mao's China, the work point (gongfen) system has been re-incorporated into the rural governance structure in a digital format to mobilize and nudge villagers’ participation in rural governance.

Figure 1.

The interface of the Xiangcun Ding app and Ding Gongfen app.

Ding Gongfen was implemented in Jiande as a data-driven governance initiative in response to the central government's policy directives to advance the adoption of data scoring systems in rural governance. Recognizing the potential of the data scoring system as a new governance mechanism in rural areas, the central government issued a notice to local governments in July 2020, urging them to adopt it in rural grassroots governance². As part of a national pilot project to enhance moral governance and ensure the stability of rural society, the data scoring system is promoted as an important innovation to address key and difficult issues in rural governance, enhance civic competence, and promote self-governance.

According to the official document,³ building a technology-driven smart governance system, promoting rules by morality through upholding moral codes, and enhancing self-governance by cultivating citizens’ civic agency are all useful complements to the rule of law. As Trevaskes (2024) puts it, under Xi Jinping's administration, the infrastructure of moral governance is being expanded through various initiatives and discourses including technology innovation, ideology and local networks. Following the State Council's Guiding Opinions on Improving Grassroots Governance Systems and Modernizing Governance Capacity, the Jiande government has integrated smart governance initiatives into a framework that combines three governance models – self-governance, rule of law, and moral governance – pioneering the development of an organic rural governance system (Gov.cn, 2021). In our case, the development of the Ding Gongfen app, including its associated app Xiangcun Ding, reflects the state's efforts to embed ideology within the moral infrastructure through partnerships with local governments and Alibaba. As the state's important partner in driving the digitalization of rural society, Alibaba launched the first ‘Digital Village Initiatives’ white paper in China, outlining a new infrastructure plan for ‘Digital Villages’ that can be quickly replicated across the country in September 2020 (China Daily, 2020). Following this plan, Alibaba has transformed its digital architecture of Ding Ding app, which is an enterprise-focused chat app, into the material and technical base to support various visions of digital village construction (China Daily, 2020).

Further, Alibaba also sent working groups and technicians to villages to support the implementation of those initiatives. During the deployment of Xiangcun Ding, technicians from Alibaba remained in Jiande villages to better integrate the needs of local governments at the county, township, and village levels. They provided immediate technical support for the implementation of moral governance and for the operation of Xiangcun Ding and Ding Gongfen. During our ethnographic visits to villages in 2022, a staff member from Alibaba was travelling and joined us for the Zuotan meetings. Through conversations with them, we learned that technicians strictly followed the demands and requirements of grassroots governments. For instance, they attended all the town hall meetings in which users, app moderators, and the village committee discussed the app's drawbacks and technical issues. In those meetings, the technicians gathered feedback on trial versions of the app and suggestions for enhancing its functionality, and subsequently addressed technical concerns to ensure that the app's performance aligned with the needs and expectations of local governments. As noted in the literature review, China's moral governance is implemented through the co-optation of technology companies. Such asymmetric power showed that the political authorities were exerting leading influence over the design of infrastructural systems to ensure that the operation of techno-moral governance reflects their broader governance ambitions.

Indeed, the implementation of the data scoring system has been key to the development of the moral governance infrastructure and an important part of the national project of Rural Vitalization (Xiangcun Zhenxing), a long-term mission with wide-ranging implications for building a modern socialist China. A crucial objective of rural revitalization is to strengthen rural civilization and promote socialist morality as drivers of economic growth. Achieving this required more than simply partnering with tech companies; local governments played a vital role in adapting the policy framework to local conditions. While the implementation of Xiangcun Ding had to align with party-state ideology and regulations to support civilizational governance⁴, Jiande government introduced the data scoring system as part of its moral governance (De·Zhili) strategy. Designed to advance Core Socialist Values, particularly civility and harmony, the system sought to reinforce rural social norms (Xiangfeng Wenming), regarded as the foundation of rural revitalization (CPPCC News, 2025).

Moreover, the local government brands Jiande as a place that values virtue, morality and heroic traditions rooted in its local history. Jiande regards its cultural heritage of ‘doing good deeds and building virtue’ (Jiande/Jiangong Lide), which was the royal name given to the historical hero Quan Sun, who was the emperor of Jiande thousands of years ago, as an important part of its local cultural identity. Nowadays, moral traditions rooted in Confucian values are promoted in local social and cultural life, such as filial piety and family culture. Highlighting its local moral traditions, Jiande presents itself as a pioneering actor in civility reforms and techno-moral governance, demonstrating its ambition to develop a national model of rural digital governance.

Our observation at the Zuotan meetings and reading of the policy documents show the Jiande government cultivates a civic culture that is in alliance with the party-state, paving the way for collaborative governance on the implementation of the data scoring system. Specifically, the local governments could determine the criteria of moral measurement and assessment, which draw on village regulations and civil charters. These criteria included changing outmoded habits and customs, upholding family values, protecting the environment, career success, economic contributions to local development, maintaining ethical norms and social harmony, and so on. These assessments are then built into the app as the scoring criteria. The village regulations and civil charters are adopted as behavioural codes and social norms for the exercise of rural governance. They are promoted as a way of ‘standardizing everyday life’ (Qiushi Online, 2023) and meanwhile, cultivating the normative basis of social governance (Trevaskes, 2024). According to the vice-director of the Department of Agriculture in Jiande, the operation of the rating system was ‘based on the common socialist values that has been promoted across the whole county and the specific village regulations released by every village; there is freedom for each village to adopt it into projects and issues that they think difficult to deal with’ (quote from the Zuotan meeting in Songkou village on 4 July 2021).

Importantly, the specific assessment criteria are defined to facilitate the village governments’ tackling the troublesome issues that are currently on their agenda. For instance, the moral assessment is broadly based on three subtypes of moral values in villages of Dayang township, and these items are measured as either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ to nudge villagers’ behaviours (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The criteria of the moral assessment in Dayang Township.

Similar moral values are measured via the Ding Gongfen across villages, but specific actions are rated differently across villages. For instance, Pengjia village in Hangtou township (Figure 3) has defined the measurement criteria differently, with a stronger emphasis on the prohibition of petitioning without prior internal deliberation at the village level. The ban on skip-level petitions is intended to encourage rural citizens to deliberate on and resolve conflicts within the village, thereby enhancing grassroots self-governance (Zuotan meeting minutes, Pengjia village).

Figure 3.

The criteria of the moral assessment in Pengjia Village in Hangtou Township.

As Figures 2 and 3 show, the socialist core values promoted by Xi's administration have been integrated into moral education to encourage villagers to adhere to the Party's leadership in fostering a ‘new type of human civilization’. In the Xi era, social security, green transformation and building an alternative civil society to the Western model are prioritized as the party-state's major ideological tasks for Chinese modernization and socialist development with Chinese characteristics. The moral rating via Ding Gongfen is implemented to support the achievement of these goals. Restraints on contentious behaviour was highlighted as a major type of ‘don’ts’ in the rating system. In both Dayang Township (Figure 2) and Hangtou Township (Figure 3), not having conflicts with others and refraining from cross-level or continuous petitioning are rated as ‘morally good’. Conversely, involvement in social conflicts and engagement in cross-level, continuous petitioning are regarded as morally wrong and subject to penalties. These criteria serve as a form of moral education, ideologically linked to Xi's social security ambitions to maintain a stable social order.

Moreover, some criteria for moral assessment encourage participatory and civic practices within the permitted space to mobilize social vitality. Figure 2 and Figure 3 demonstrate that environmental participation (garbage sorting and practising green lifestyle), participating in public discussion and volunteering in community affairs receive positive ratings. These civic codes are included in the positive criteria, mobilizing the masses to voluntarily engage in the party-state's framework of civil society. These activities do not challenge the legitimacy of the local leadership; instead, they help the administrative power implement state policies and forge a party-led civil society that aligns grassroots participation with its ideological framework. In the meantime, the Jiande government refers to its local moral traditions, such as filial piety and Confucian values like ‘harmony’ and ‘doing good deeds and building virtue’ (Jiangong Lide) as discursive resources to rationalize the party-state's ideological terms that aim to foster a conflict-free or harmonious society and build an alternative mode of civic engagement to rights-based contention.

As shown in the village regulations and civil charters (Figures 2 and 3), the moral construction and assessment is expanded into organizational regulations, professional codes, economic activities and family life, serving as a tool that disciplines various aspects of villagers’ everyday lives. Thus, an expanded sense of rural morality has been integrated into the datafied governance experiment in Jiande. The algorithmic imagination of rural morality partly responds to the national directives of securitizing rural society and building a new form of civilization, while the local and traditional culture are referenced as cultural resources to rationalize the ideological orientations. Renewing the meaning of rural morality by inserting the modern socialist values into the local moral custom, the Jiande government tried to embed the ideologies of governance into the material affordances of the app. Thus, through the construction of digital infrastructure, the state aimed to integrate its governance ideologies into the local moral values practised in people's everyday life as cultural norms and codes, thereby disciplining villagers’ social behaviours and actions. Although Xiangcun Ding and Ding Gongfen have been widely used in Jiande, this techno-moral governance model is still being made and remade, subject to the central and local ambitions of governance and the associated network of power relations.

Institutionalizing the algorithmic imagination of rural morality

As discussed above, techno-moral governance in Jiande is based on a conceptual expansion of rural morality, which has been algorithmically imagined as an important cultural resource for governance. The operation of the techno-moral governance is not only shaped by technological power, but also by social and institutional forces embedded within the techno-moral infrastructures. Although the scoring system is supported by algorithms, the implementation of the calculation technique and the adoption of the rating system still rely on manual processes and institutional arrangements established by local governments.

In our case, the implementation of Xiangcun Ding and Ding Gongfen is guaranteed by the strong involvement of multi-layered administrative power. Administrative human resources, such as grid heads (village cadres) and grid managers (normally composed of paid villagers), are recruited to mobilize the collective use of the digital point-reward system among villagers to implement the unified assessment of rural morality. As part of the grassroots administrative system, the grid members are the primary contacts of villagers, representing ‘an extension of the existing bureaucratic system to the grass-roots level’ (Mittelstaedt, 2021: 3). To make sure that villagers actively use the data scoring system in their daily life, grid members visit door to door to motivate them to participate in community issues more proactively, playing an important role in transforming the voluntary use of the app into a nearly compulsory move. Recruiting grassroots volunteers and paying them to perform certain managerial roles follows the logic of ‘mass line’ that has been an important strategy in the CCP's mass mobilization of villagers in productive activities in Mao's socialist experiment. Including villagers themselves in the basic unit of governance helps enhance the cohesion of the state ideologies in the everyday life of communities.

The operation of the work point system in the 1960s follows a mode of ‘participatory management’ with a small team of households (20 more or less) as the unit of labour governance to increase efficiency in management (Ahn, 1975). To better achieve the goals of production set by the state, team leadership often sought advice from experienced peasants who play a leadership role in rural communities in their planning of production (Ahn, 1975). Our fieldwork data shows that the management of the digital system draws on the experiences of participatory management associated with the work point system back then. To implement the data scoring system efficiently, the village cadres have recruited a group of villagers who are influential members of the communities as a working entity to manage its daily operation. They are responsible for assessing the moral performance of villagers based on the specific assessment criteria of each village. Similar to the work point system, digital points are awarded to villagers in the unit of a household. When villagers apply for reward points, they need to follow the procedures designed in the app, providing evidence for the good deeds that they have done. The selected villagers serve as reviewers, checking the performance of applicants and determining the credits that should be given or diminished. The grid members and the selected villagers work as a small unit of informal bureaucracy in the manual process, helping the village party branch manage the data scoring system and get the techno-moral governance implemented.

To guarantee the efficient operation of the data scoring system, specific management rules have been established. Each village has worked out their moral assessment rules and mobilized human and material resources to build a well-working point system. Figure 4 demonstrates the operational system of the app with an example from Youyi village⁵. As shown, villagers can apply for reward points through Ding Gongfen by uploading evidence of their good deeds in the specific category into which their activities can be classified. The screenshot of notifications in Figure 4 displays how moderators approve or reject the applications, after which villagers receive automatic notifications about the outcome of their applications from the app. The outcome is calculated by algorithms and then automatically ranked on the electronic standing book on Xiangcun Ding. Then, villagers can use the earned points to get material gifts and life necessities such as dish cleanser, vinegar and Coca Cola. During our visits, we find that the calculation of scores and the ranking rely on the automated system, while the assessment of behaviours largely remains manual. The operation of techno-moral governance via Xiangcun Ding is partially automated and partially manual.

Figure 4.

The operation of the Ding Gongfen app in Youyi Village.

The rankings are updated monthly on Xiangcun Ding and the public announcement board in the village, directing citizens’ moral behaviours through the culture of mianzi (face) and shaming. In Chinese culture, mianzi plays an important role in maintaining ‘social currency and personal status’ (Park and Luo, 2001). Shaming serves as a moral disciplining technique, not only brings embarrassment to individuals but also to their entire family. At the Zuotan meeting in Pengjia village, we learned from the head of Hangtou Township that the final score is visible to all villagers via the app, while the penalty is only accessible to the individual and remains invisible to others. Given the significance of mianzi (face) in social life, punishment is applied mildly to avoid strong criticism and consequently a considerable loss of face for villagers. For instance, the Gaoheng village committee does not assign scores below zero, and it does not publicly shame villagers with lower scores. Instead, the grid members will notify families with lower scores and have private conversations with them to help them enhance their future performance (Zuotan meeting minutes). Although avoiding public punishment, the direct engagement and the public-facing in-app ranking conveyed a sense of moral failure among the individuals. The ranking did not necessarily lead to punishments; the local government seemed to prefer a more positive approach to encourage compliance through a rewarding mechanism.

Villagers who get the highest score will be selected as a ‘Moral Model’ and listed in the red name list. According to the rules of the work point system during socialist China, a worker must show both the best political attitudes and the best quality of work to be nominated as the model (Ahn, 1975). Nowadays, ideological consciousness is still given considerable weight in the selection of the moral model alongside the moral performance. To obtain a good score, villagers need to align with the party's social security goals, such as holding unconfrontational attitudes towards the grassroots government, refraining from social conflicts, and avoiding level-skipping petitions. Those with high-ranking scores are given priority in the nomination of ‘The Best Villager’, and their applications for rural development grants tend to receive favourable consideration. The honour bestowed on the Moral Model and the Best Villager contributes to the idealization of the rural morality that underpins the state's ideological framework, thus encouraging villagers to internalize those moral codes.

Moreover, citizens with high scores can get material rewards such as gift cards and bonuses, which can be used to exchange life necessities at the ‘Moral Banks/Supermarkets’ (Daode Yinhang/Chaoshi, Figure 5) that are particularly built for providing rewards to those well-behaved villagers. What is worth noting is that Jiande Rural Commercial Bank has established moral bank accounts for villagers, through which those villagers with high-ranking scores can win inclusive financial services that are especially provided to the poor and low-income population (China News, 2021). The policy directives in building moral banks and supermarkets have further institutionalized and solidified the consequence-bearing ranking system. Implementing both the rewards and shaming measures, the data-driven techno-moral governance encourages villagers to internalize and commit to the norms of social behaviours that are paternalistically set by the grassroots governments and serve as a supervisory gaze for the state.

Figure 5.

Moral supermarket at Gaoheng village in Dayang Township.

The work point system that was historically practised in Mao's China is mimicked in the digital implementation of Ding Gongfen and Xiangcun Ding app by the grassroots governments. Particularly, the mobilized and participatory collectivity that was cultivated to mobilize farmers to participate in social production in Mao's China has been revitalized and reshaped to promote the popular use of the app among villagers and thus their participation in the techno-moral governance. With the involvement of both formal administrative power and informal bureaucracy to institutionalize the algorithmic operation of moral assessment, the Jiande government has created a new mode of social governance assisted but not entirely driven by technologies.

Discussion and conclusion

This study traces the deployment of Ding Gongfen, a data scoring system, to assess the morality of villagers in Zhejiang Jiande, as a national pilot project of techno-moral governance in China. The algorithmic imagination and evaluation of morality via Ding Gongfen and its institutionalization into the rural grassroots governance system shows that the structuration of algorithms is shaped by the political, ideological, historical and cultural context of the rural area of Zhejiang. Moreover, the quantification of rural morality as a technique of governance helps motivate ‘an alternative model of civic engagement’ (Trevaskes, 2024, p. 10) that encourages a certain level of participation among citizens and non-state actors while the state maintains control. By paying attention to the development of platforms as governance infrastructure in villages, this study has demonstrated how social governance operates on the entanglement between data-media technology and everyday life in rural China.

The study shows that the implementation of techno-moral governance is inherently localized effort: the imagination and institutionalization of the data scoring system were situated within a political and sociocultural context that resonates well with the socialist legacies, the historical memory and everyday culture in Jiande. Revitalizing the mobilizational and participatory collectivism practised in Mao's China, Ding Gongfen has motivated the masses to participate in the moral assessment of their social behaviours. More importantly, drawing upon socialist history and memory provides legitimacy to the datafication of people's everyday life. Relying on both formal administrative forces and informal bureaucracy composed of volunteers and selected villagers from rural communities, it has been incorporated into the existing governance system with the intention to mould people to be good villagers and enhance civic compliance among rural population. Reactivating the ‘mass line’ mechanism of the work point system practised in the socialist era, Ding Gongfen enables co-construction and community-based operation of techno-moral governance under the party's leadership.

This new governing technique also relies on the state's move to co-opt with giant tech actors in techno-moral governance. With the involvement of multiple actors, it continues and reforms the existing social order by aligning it with the state's plan of creating a new type of civilization that is good for national development. Inheriting the historical legacies of the work point system, the rewarding system of Ding Gongfen targets villagers’ daily needs by following how daily life resources were allocated according to the points villagers earn through collective farming and production in Mao's era.

By exploring techno-moral governance in the rural context, this study implies that inserting moral assessment into the operation of platforms has created a workable mechanism of self-governance. It has incorporated and further developed the Fengqiao Experiences of mobilizing and relying on the masses to solve social conflicts at the local level that were rooted in rural Zhejiang to facilitate the state achieving its security goals of building a harmonious rural society. As a measure of both governance and control in the new era, the data scoring system built into Xiangcun Ding meets the expectations of the Zhejiang government in enhancing villagers’ self-governance, which aims to prevent the emergence of ‘rightful resistance’ in rural areas (O’Brien and Li, 2006). Transforming the state's governing ideologies into big data technologies and rural morality, a new social governance model that operates through the moral gaze of everyday life is in the making.

Shifting the attention to the infrastructural building and the material base of social governance in the rural context, this study sheds light on how platforms have been used to govern rural China. Focusing on rural China is not only moving beyond the ‘urban-centric approach’ in the conventional knowledge about social governance that tends to concentrate on the discursive construction of public opinion in the digital era (King et al., 2013, 2017; Liu and Zhao, 2021; Schneider, 2018; Yang, 2017), we also hope to highlight the test-bed nature of rural China and how this spatial unit is now at the forefront of experimenting China's techno-moral governance. The focus on techno-moral governance in rural China expands our attention to the materiality of technology and socio-material space in everyday life, beyond focusing on discursive politics. On one hand, the government is building its ideologies of governance into the affordances of Xiangcun Ding app's data scoring system, reshaping their mode of operation and control. On the other hand, the app serves as an everyday infrastructure that materializes the ranking of morality into social capital (such as lending credits and social trusts) and daily necessities (such as groceries) to meet the villagers’ specific social needs and material desires in everyday life. Platforms govern villagers in the rural context through the distribution of (material) life resources and embracing the social and lifeworld needs of the rural population, resonating with the socialistic history of social governance of rural life. The practice of techno-moral governance via Xiangcun Ding in Jiande reflects a logic governance enacted through moral, technological, and bureaucratic power, which is deeply rooted in China's socialistic traditions of rural governance yet rearticulated through digital platforms and data-driven technologies.

Conceptualizing the rise of techno-moral governance and analysing the operation of Ding Gongfen as a case of techno-moral governance in rural China, this research highlights the material and social turn in China's social governance. As the study further shows, governments nowadays do not need to reach people in the physical space to achieve their goals of governance. They can instead embed their ideologies into the infrastructures of governance. The platformization of Chinese society has enabled the materialization of the Party-State's ideologies in the form of services provision and in everyday lives (Chen and Qiu, 2019; Sun and Wang, 2022). Thus, the space of governing becomes the space of social and material interaction. Hence, there is a need to redirect our attention towards the material-discursive underpinnings of digital governance initiatives to unravel both the material turn and the social turn in social governance and its implications.

While the case of Ding Gongfen and the Xiangcun Ding app illustrates a form of digital transformation in China's rural governance, our study has several limitations. First, our analysis is primarily framed through a governance perspective – focusing on political ambition, ideological articulation, and discursive construction – without accounting for how these meanings are interpreted or negotiated by villagers. Due to ethical constraints and local government protocols, we were only permitted to speak with villagers invited to Zuotan meetings, whose responses may have been self-censored. To avoid potential harm, we refrained from direct engagement, resulting in limited insight into users’ everyday experiences of techno-moral governance. We consider this as a valuable direction for future research.

Second, our empirical scope was restricted: we accessed only 10 of the 239 villages due to logistical and institutional limitations. Rather than offering generalizable findings, we aim to illustrate a political project in formation – one that embodies ideological vision and experimental mechanisms consistent with the Communist Party's historical governance strategies. Our reflections on fieldwork – such as navigating consent procedures with the Jiande government, coordinating with Alibaba technicians, and relying on administrative support – offer methodological insights that may inform future research design and planning. Future studies could benefit from broader empirical engagement across diverse village contexts to better capture the heterogeneity of local responses and practices.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the editors of the journal for their consistent, supportive and friendly engagement. Our sincere thanks also go to the three anonymous reviewers for their meticulous reading of the manuscript and constructive comments, which have significantly contributed to the refinement of this article.

ORCID iDs

Yu Sun

Wilfred Yang Wang

Linlin Li

Funding

We would like to express our gratitude to the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow for supporting this work through the Early Career Researcher Funding Scheme.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Yu Sun is the Lecturer in Media and Sociology at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests involve political communication, digital politics, critical data studies, algorithms and social governance, feminist media studies and environmental communication, etc. 

Wilfred Yang Wang is the Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on data and algorithmic governance, the biopolitics of ageing, diasporic media, digital geography, and China. 

Linlin Li is now an Assistant Researcher at the Land Academy for National Development, Zhejiang University. Her PhD thesis ‘Transformation of the Law on Farmland Transfer in China: from a Governance Perspective’ has been published by Eleven International Publishing at Den Haag in January 2016.

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Rating villagers’ morality: Techno-moral governance via a data scoring system in rural China

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The rise of techno-moral governance in China

Understanding moral governance

A brief history of China's moral governance

Governing with technologies

Techno-moral governance

Methodology

The case: data scoring system in Xiangcun Ding

Research methods

Imagining a bigger sense of rural morality

Institutionalizing the algorithmic imagination of rural morality

Discussion and conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ORCID iDs

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Notes

Author biographies

References