Dancing with anklets: Navigating digital rural governance with big data in China

The digital village strategy is a critical component of China’s national blueprint for integrating big data and digital technologies into rural revitalization. This study investigates the implementation of digital grid governance in rural China through a case study of County F—a national pilot site for the Digital Village Strategy. The study highlights the flexible, experimental, and iterative nature of local implementation, shaped by bureaucratic constraints and grassroots realities. The findings illustrate that digital governance entails significant financial and labor investments, particularly regarding frontline actors tasked with continual data collection and reporting. The study emphasizes the central role of relational labor in sustaining digital systems—an often invisible effort rooted in trust, familiarity, and embeddedness within local social networks. Such labor helps local officials navigate tensions between top-down mandates and rural complexities. Digital governance functions more as a symbolic performance of administrative achievement than as a tool for effective governance. The metaphor of “dancing with anklets” captures the politics of ambivalence under digital constraints.