The Impact Factors and Management Policy of Digital Village Development: A Case Study of Gansu Province, China

(1) Background: Along with the maturity of smart cities, digital villages and smart villages are receiving more attention than ever before as the key to promote sustainable rural development. The Chinese government has made great efforts in promoting the digital development of villages in recent years, as evidenced by policies intensively introduced by the central and local governments, making China a typical representative country in the world. (2) Methods: This paper evaluates the performance and geographic pattern of rural digital development by the Geographic Information System (GIS) in Gansu, a less developed province in western China, and analyzes the driving mechanism of rural digital development using GeoDetector, providing a basis for spatial zoning and differentiated policy design for the construction, planning and management of digital villages based on the GE matrix. (3) Results: First, the development of digital villages shows a prominent geographical imbalance, with 79 counties divided into leader, follower and straggler levels. Second, digital villages show unsynchronized development in different dimensions, with the village facilities digitalization index in the lead and the village economy digitalization index lagging behind. Thirdly, the development of digital villages is characterized by significant spatial correlation and spillover effects, with cold and hot counties distributed in clusters, forming a "center-periphery" structure. Fourth, the factors show significant influence differentiation. They are classified into all-purpose, multifunctional and single-functional factors by their scope of action, and into key, important and auxiliary factors by their intensity of action. Fifth, the interaction and driving mechanism between different factors is quite complex, dominated by nonlinear enhancement and bifactor enhancement, and the synergistic effect of factor pairs helps increase the influence by 1-4 times. (4) Conclusions: It is suggested that the government develop differentiated policies for zoning planning and management based on the level of digital development of villages in combination with the factor influence and its driving mechanism and promote regional linkage and common development and governance through top-level design.