Page 101 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

YAN Hui / Structural origins of digital poverty in rural China 101

The eight types of digital poverty do not cover all typical individual cases. For instance, there are
individual evidences from fields supporting the intersection of the physically poor and the digital
illiterate, and moreover the overlapping sort of the physically poor, the psychologically vulnerable,
and digital resister. The latter mixed group of people can be demonstrated by the standpoints
from parents of school-aged children, in which they argue that online gaming is damaging their
children’s school performance and results in network addiction. It seems reasonable for the parents
to resist the digital phenomena and stand firmly against digitalization revolution, and refuse to
equip their children with digital devices including smart cell phones and computers and related
connecting services. Some households never permit the school-aged youngsters to get access to
ICTs, even if they are not physically and digitally poor. As a result, the young students are pushed
into another public digital sphere, cybercafé, which ever caused serious social problem, like
network addiction, kinds of crime. In other situations, the digital idle and the socially lonely have
positive relevance with each other. To understand the relationship from cause-and-effect perspective,
the social lonely individuals in digital practice are frequently lacking in efficient social support
and therefore gain no digital capability and successful ICT using experiences. Consequently, they
become resistant to spend long time and energy and hold negative or indifferent attitudes towards
digitalization, which is defined as digital idle state, and conversely tends to seek for help from their
social network.
The descriptive dimensions of digital poverty are more complex and comprehensive than those
(Caceres, 2007; X.H. Zhou, 2016) in the published documents, and more suitable for exploring the
reality in rural areas of China. They are elementary for my analysis of structural origins of digital
poverty in China.

3 Structural factors determining digital poverty

3.1 Structural poverty and origins

Structural poverty, relatively unchanged and stable status of deficiency of resources and assets, is
mainly determined by economic structure, public policy, cultural structure, and social structure, but
not decided by personal subjective efforts and micro-level behaviors.
Typical phenomena of structural poverty are stated as below (Sanders, 1991; Jordan, 2004;
May & Woolard, 2007; Beeghley, 1988; Brady, 2009): imbalanced development of regional
economics, economic poverty caused by macro-level public policy, decreasing of job positions
created by economic trend from commodity production to services, structural poverty embedded
in election policy, rate of unemployment, poverty in some other social groups discriminated by
specific public policy on single-parent families and ethnic groups, cultural poverty from ethnic
policies or discrimination, voluntary poverty relied on welfare policy, poverty from population and
labor structure, poverty originated from institutional gender discrimination, whole poverty from