This paper explores the significance of digital governance for sustainable rural development in China, emphasizing the collaborative efforts of village administrative organizations, new agricultural business entities, and peasant households. Utilizing an evolutionary game approach, we examine the decision-making behaviors and stability points of these three entities within the context of rural digital governance. Our analysis is grounded in a mechanism of interest linkage among the stakeholders, with numerical simulations used to assess the impact of key variables and parameters on their evolutionary outcomes. The paper reveals that village administrative organizations are highly sensitive to changes in performance gains, special subsidies, penalty losses, and benefit distribution coefficients. Enhancing these variables can significantly motivate these organizations to engage in digital governance. In contrast, new agricultural business entities and peasant households demonstrate a stronger and more consistent willingness to collaborate, minimally affected by variable changes, which suggests a solid economic and social foundation for rural digital governance in China. Our paper underscores the need for positive incentives and a robust fault-tolerance mechanism to foster collaboration among village administrative organizations. It also highlights the importance of integrating new agricultural business entities into the digital governance framework to promote sustainable rural development. These insights provide valuable theoretical and practical implications for policymakers aiming to enhance the efficacy and inclusivity of digital governance in rural China.

Micro-credit for poverty alleviation is an important financial measure of targeted poverty reduction and rural revitalization in China. This paper employs the OLS model and Logit model to empirically test the effect of micro-credit for poverty alleviation on the income level and stability of income growth of farmers based on the field survey data of 458 registered poverty-stricken farmer households in Fuping County and Quyang County of Hebei Province. The results suggest that micro-credit for poverty alleviation can increase farmers’ income, stabilize the growth of their income, and exert significant short-term and long-term effects on income growth and poverty alleviation. The specialized farmer cooperatives, the scale of production and operation, the proportion of family labor force, and the education level of the head of the farmer’s household exert a significantly positive effect on the farmers’ income and the stable growth of their income. There is a significant interaction between micro-credit for poverty alleviation and specialized farmer cooperatives. The physical conditions of family members exert a negative effect on the stable growth of their income, and other financing channels have no significant effect.