China has reported that by the end of 2025 every township and 95% of administrative villages had access to 5G networks, part of a broader drive to bring modern telecom infrastructure to rural and remote areas. Officials frame the achievement as foundational to agricultural modernisation, rural revitalisation and the wider rollout of digital public services.
The push builds on more than a decade of investment: since 2015 Beijing says it has supported fibre deployment to roughly 130,000 administrative villages and constructed nearly 110,000 4G and 5G base stations in more remote locations. Rural broadband subscriptions now exceed 200 million households and overall internet penetration in the countryside surpasses 69%, while every primary and secondary school is reported to have internet access.
Beyond schools, the authorities highlight that county-level telemedicine networks now cover all jurisdictions, and that long-standing problems with communications in hard-to-reach areas have been “fundamentally solved.” State planners present these developments as enabling better education, health care, logistics and farm productivity through faster data links and expanded digital services.
The announcement also signals continuity into the next Five-Year planning period: Beijing plans a fresh round of “signal upgrades” during the 15th Five-Year Plan to extend and improve new-type infrastructure in rural and remote areas. The emphasis will be on ensuring that farmers, rural businesses and local governments not only have network coverage but can use more advanced connectivity for internet-of-things, precision agriculture and e‑commerce.
The scale of the rollout is notable: bringing fibre to tens of thousands of villages and building base stations in sparsely populated terrain is capital- and logistics-intensive, and has long been a bottleneck. State support and coordination among the big telecom operators have been essential, and public funding or subsidies appear to have played a significant role in closing the basic coverage gap.
But coverage statistics mask important caveats. Signal presence does not guarantee affordable or high-quality service, and many rural households still lack 5G-capable devices or the digital skills to exploit advanced applications. Backhaul capacity, power reliability, maintenance of remote towers and last-mile connectivity remain operational challenges, particularly in mountainous and border regions where the lingering 5% of unconnected administrative villages are likely concentrated.
There are also governance and economic questions. Expanding 5G and digital public services can increase productivity and social inclusion, yet it also creates new vectors for data collection and integration of rural populations into national governance systems. For private operators, the return on investment in thinly populated areas is uncertain unless new monetisable services — from precision agriculture to telehealth subscriptions — scale quickly.
Overall, the 2025 milestone represents a significant step toward narrowing China’s urban-rural digital divide, but turning meters of fibre and towers into sustained economic and social gains will require continued investment in devices, applications, affordability measures and local capacity building. How Beijing manages that transition will determine whether connectivity becomes a transformative platform for rural development or primarily a symbolic infrastructure achievement.