With the advent of the information age, digital technology has penetrated all aspects of human life and exerted a profound influence on people’s social interactions and social relations. As an important variable in primary-level social governance, geo-spatial relationships have acquired new characteristics and connotations in the digital era.

Traditional geo-spatial relationship

In traditional society, kinship was the main social bond connecting individuals. Relationships with geographic proximity and kinship highly overlapped and were inseparable from one another at this time. In other words, geo-spatial relationships between people were part of traditional society’s differentiated pattern, and these relationships were one of the internal identifiers for people in villages.

However, Chinese sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong observed that as people began to gather in cities with the development of commerce, interpersonal relationships based on kinship could not be maintained in the same ways as before, and geo-spatial relationships gradually began to lose kinship connotations, transiting to pure social relationships which took proximity within a shared geographical space as the standard. But these types of pure proximal geo-spatial relationships that existed in cities were relatively rare. Therefore, on the level of social governance, the geo-spatial relationships based on kinship still played an irreplaceable role.

Remarkable new features

After the reform and opening up, urbanization blossomed rapidly with an increasingly frequent flow between urban and rural areas. The new generation of migrant workers from China’s rural society was gradually separated from their rural roots, while in cities, social distances continued moving farther and farther even though people lived within relative geographic proximity. As a result, no meaningful social groups were formed in cities. This kind of social change resulted in the fact that the already weak geo-spatial relationships dissolved into connections in name only. Meanwhile, a grid-governance model based on the division of geographic spaces has been widely implemented with the development of various information technologies, and people have gradually realized the significance of geographic relationships. Therefore, geographically proximal relationships have been re-established, forming a new type of geo-spatial relationship in the digital age.

Compared with the proximal geo-relationships in traditional society, the re-established relationships have some remarkable features. By sharing the experience of social governance events, whether big or small, people within the same grid are aware that a common governance community exists and bonds them together. From the reasonable division of the grid, to resident information statistics within the grid, and to the monitoring and tackling of public governance events—all of these cannot be separated from the underpinning of advanced information technologies, and people within the grid also often establish local contact through a variety of instant messaging software systems. Geographically proximal relationships have regained their vitality at the social governance level.

On one hand, traditional geo-spatial relationships can reflect both closeness and distance within a community. The moral concept this forms is thus the basis for maintaining social order, and public opinion is the tool that plays an important role in maintaining that order. In comparison, the new geo-spatial relationships form a kind of public governance space. They delineate the basic spatial boundary of social governance within a certain region, which can clarify the participants who need to assume governance responsibility after a public event occurs. In the city, the boundary can be identified often by an apartment complex or a few buildings, and in the countryside, by a village or a few villages. This means that demarcated boundaries are always clearly visible. The maintenance of social order is thus a ternary combination of autonomy, rule by law, and rule by virtue. Therefore, the new type of geo-spatial relationship is of great significance for social governance, and people’s contact with each other are all maintained centering on social governance.

On the other hand, individuals form an emotional community in the traditional society with quite frequent and close communication between each other. However, as group members are bound by the new type of geo-spatial relationship, interpersonal contact is mostly conducted online, which makes it difficult to form a stable emotional community. Since individuals within such groups usually have limited personal connections with fewer or even no interactions, their demands and interests tend to be diversified, which is more likely to cause dispute and contradiction.

Differentiated strategies

In general, the application of geo-spatial relations in social governance has a profound historical tradition. With the help of information technology and the promotion of grid-governance mode, it has gained new vitality. However, there are still challenges in achieving the desired effect.

Faced with imbalanced and inadequate development across urban and rural areas, we should adopt differentiated strategies that cater to the reality of local conditions. Re-establishing proximal relationships should be carried out in cities and relatively developed rural areas, while for rural areas which develop relatively slowly, maintaining traditional geo-spatial relationships characterized by kinship is more suitable. In terms of the fundamental purpose of social governance, if it meets people’s ever-growing needs for a better life, there is no superior or inferior governance strategy. Perhaps in big cities with an obvious atomization trend, people can establish social ties through artificial spatial divisions, but in some rural communities, artificial division will destroy the formerly close social ties, bringing greater dilemma to social governance.

Zhu Tao and Zheng Dinghua are from the Center for Sociological Theory and Methods at Renmin University of China.