*Artificial Intelligence in the Hands of the People: The Rongjiang
Experiment
*
/Rongjiang, once one of China’s poorest counties, is turning
smartphones, mass training, and collective organisation into a
people-centred experiment in artificial intelligence./
4 September 2026
A small county folded into the mountains of south-west Guizhou,
Rongjiang was among the last counties in China to be lifted
<http://sjt.guizhou.gov.cn/xwzx/tzgg/202011/t20201125_68082574.html> out
of extreme poverty, crossing the line only on 23 November 2020, and as
late as 2022 its per-capita output
<http://paper.people.com.cn/rmzk/html/2024-05/20/content_26059086.htm>
stood at about a third of the national average. ‘Eight parts mountain,
one part water, one part field’ is how an old upland saying counted the
land in Guizhou — the only province in China without a plain. Its
valleys are terraced and narrow, its villages strung along the rivers
and ridgelines beneath Moon Mountain. There was never much land here to
produce wealth, and no easy road to carry the little produce out.
The Red Army crossed these mountains in 1934, on the march that would
take it north. Football arrived a decade later, brought
<https://www.gxu.edu.cn/info/1004/38867.htm> by students of Guangxi
University, evacuated to Rongjiang to escape Japanese aggression.
Villagers have organised their own matches nearly every year in the
eight decades since.
In May 2023, that tradition found a new expression in /Cun Chao/, the
Village Super League: a competition organised by villagers, played by
villagers, and watched by villagers. Within weeks of its launch, the
stadium’s stands were filled to the brim, and footage carried by the
short-video platforms drew the eyes of the whole country and then of the
world. None of it ran itself. Packing a stadium every weekend, keeping
order, feeding the broadcast — all of that took an organisational
capacity the county had not required before.
This organisational capacity became an engine for real economic
outcomes. Tourism revenue rose
<https://lac.tsinghua.edu.cn/info/1260/1935.htm> from 8.4 billion yuan
in 2023 to 10.8 billion in 2024, and the county’s gross domestic product
reached 10.496 billion yuan in 2024, a rise of 9.5 per cent. The league
brought
<http://paper.people.com.cn/rmzk/html/2024-05/20/content_26059086.htm>
more than 2,700 new market entities into being, over thirty per cent of
the whole prefecture’s new total, and village collective income climbed
<https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202508/12/WS689b2077a3104ba1353fc802.html>
from 58.9 million yuan in 2022 to 121 million in 2024.
It also opened a door to something else entirely. Since 2023 the county
has set itself a less likely task: to put artificial intelligence (AI)
into the hands of the villagers. It has built no large language model,
no data centre, and no semiconductor plant. What it has built instead is
its own people, organised across government offices, villages, and
enterprises, so that residents who had never written a line of code,
among them elderly farmers and village cadres, now use AI in their
everyday work.
[...]
continua qui:
https://thetricontinental.org/artificial-intelligence-in-the-hands-of-the-people-the-rongjiang-experiment/
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