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

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.