The enlightenment to digital villages construction to western regions in China

In the era of deep-seated informatization, the scale of the digital economy keeps expanding. In China, the construction of digital villages in the central and eastern regions has achieved initial results, while research on the underdeveloped western rural areas is obviously insufficient. This study, based on introducing the connotation of China's digital villages, uses CiteSpace to analyze 3 110 papers published from 1996 to 2024. It clarifies the development course and research status of China's digital villages, sums up the problems in the construction in recent years, and analyzes excellent domestic cases in response to these problems from three aspects: digital governance architecture, unique digital cultural tourism, digital empowerment to rural industries. Meanwhile, a digital rural evaluation system has been established from four first-level indicators (innovation-element input, digital-infrastructure, digital-economy-development, and digital-society-construction) and 25 second-level indicators, using multi-level data and the AHP method to quantitatively compare the composite development index of digital villages between China's western and central-eastern regions, with a difference ratio of 4.2:5.8. Finally, based on the above research and considering the current situation of western rural areas, the study offers suggestions for the digital-village-construction in the western region of China from three aspects: construction concept, path, and safeguard mechanism.