A DeepSeek moment is playing out in China’s vast countryside, as rural residents discover that chatbots are useful for providing advice on topics ranging from pig farming to pest control.
Thanks to China’s extensive internet coverage and mobile phone penetration, the country’s rural residents, who account for a third of its 1.4 billion population, are eager to apply artificial intelligence (AI) services in farming and rural life after DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based start-up, triggered a nationwide frenzy of AI adoption with its open-source models.
Chinese Big Tech firms, such as Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, have in turn developed easy-to-use chatbots to accelerate the proliferation of AI applications. Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, signed a strategic partnership with the Zhejiang provincial government partly to help narrow the rural-urban poverty gap by applying AI technologies.
China’s top AI chatbots, including Tencent’s Yuanbao, Alibaba’s Tongyi and ByteDance’s Doubao, are quickly attracting new users, including those in the vast countryside.
In Jiaohe, a town in northeastern Jilin province, a village chief reached out to Tencent directly for help in promoting AI to villagers. In advertisements displayed around the town, he encouraged the townspeople to “search Tencent Yuanbao on the app store”.
The village chief, surnamed Lu, told the Post that the chatbot has become part of rural life, as villagers used AI services to identify plants and animals, review documents, search for government subsidies, seek farming and livestock advice, and generate promotional materials for local e-commerce businesses.
Tencent formed a specialised team that initiated an “AI Goes Rural” campaign. “Features like image recognition and voice interaction have significantly lowered barriers for farmers,” a Tencent employee who is close to the project said. The company has also tweaked its AI models to meet rural needs and collaborated with local officials on education.
