Digital mediation of lineage practices: The role of WeChat in facilitating cultural continuity amid China’s rural-to-urban migration

This article explores the role of digital technologies in the maintenance of lineage practices in the context of China’s extensive rural-urban migration. Digital platforms have been shown to establish complementary infrastructure, thereby engendering new forms of participation without, however, effecting a fundamental transformation of traditional authority structures. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Zhuye Village, Anhui Province (2018–2019), including analysis of WeChat group interactions and participant observation of ancestral tomb reconstruction, to trace how the Yang lineage mobilised dispersed members across geographic distance. The findings demonstrate that WeChat facilitates collective action through three mechanisms: amplifying traditional forms of moral suasion and social monitoring for resource mobilisation; enabling a division of labour where migrant coordinators manage communication while village-based elders retain decision-making authority; and creating digital deliberation spaces that ultimately depend on embodied, localised practices for project realization. This study reveals how WeChat enables translocal coordination while preserving place-based authority, challenging the notion that platforms ‘break constraints of time and space’ by showing how digital platforms facilitate resource mobilisation and communication across geographic distance. However, decision-making and project realisation remain anchored in village space through face-to-face negotiations, contributing to understandings of cultural continuity under mass mobility by demonstrating how traditional institutions produce hybrid spatial configuration. Lineage organisations adapt through digital incorporation, maintaining ties to rural origins while modernising, and this is a pattern characteristic of China’s urban-rural integration with broader implications for understanding spatial adaptation in the Global South.