A small county folded into the mountains of south-west Guizhou, Rongjiang was among the last counties in China to be lifted out of extreme poverty, crossing the line only on 23 November 2020, and as late as 2022 its per-capita output 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 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 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 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 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.

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continua qui: https://thetricontinental.org/artificial-intelligence-in-the-hands-of-the-people-the-rongjiang-experiment/