## 8 Discussion and Implications  
The provincial variation across the infrastructure and use groups is relatively small, whereas provincial inequality for IT services and e-commerce is large, as reflected by their elevated coefficients of variation. This finding relates to prior studies identifying the succession of stages of ICT access, use, and purposeful use [6; 7; 8]. In China, access and use have mostly achieved evenness among the provinces. The low variation in infrastructure implies that access is available throughout the provinces. Likewise, there is a tendency towards evenness of use variables across provinces. The high variation among provinces in purposeful uses (IT services and e-commerce) implies that these specialized uses are in earlier adoption and diffusion stage in China and hence represent a large digital divide that persists in the country. Regarding the spatial patterning of these purposeful uses, we argue, based on the mapping results, that the enterprises providing IT services and e-commerce are concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai, and the eastern coastal provinces, with reduced presence in the western, northern, and south-central provinces. On the other hand, the more even provincial spatial distribution of infrastructure per capita is the outcome of the Chinese government's policy that has encouraged digital infrastructure throughout the country as well as the business strategies of provider enterprises that have realized market opportunities in previously \"poorly wired\" provinces. The Chinese government's 13 th five-year plan also sought to even out the infrastructure throughout the nation. The use group of variables is mostly mobile, inexpensive, and supported by the widening of available internet infrastructure. The regression findings regarding determinants of the internet and ICT point to which factors dominate but also which ones show little or no relationships with ICT. The dominant importance of science and technology expenditures is in concert with China's 13 th 5-year plan in 2016, which emphasized innovation-driven development as a major pillar [47]. The latest Chinese national 5-year plan approved in 2021 put even more emphasis on scientific innovation, with seven technology targets, which include semiconductors, quantum computers, and artificial intelligence. We argue that the dominance of science and technology expenditures is partly the result of the national government's multi-year planning effort to build up domestic innovation and technology [61]. The second most important factor of household income is unsurprising, as income has been reported in prior studies and also because given that the year 2020 data come after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, household income would encourage increased use of the internet and technology at home to offset work-related exposure to the virus. Teachers' secondary importance is consistent with education's prominence in multiple digital divide studies, both in China and external to it. A surprising secondary determinant is the influence of the non-Han (minority) population. We reason that minorities are leapfrogging from their prior very low ICT and internet usage levels to approach or even exceed national averages, although the data do not include the quality and sophistication of ICT use. There would presumably be more catching up to do in specialized, highly skilled uses. An example is e-commerce variables, with which the non-Han proportion presently has almost no association. The cluster analyses for the four groups show that the spatial distribution of ICT varies considerably in China. Comparing across the four groups of cluster analysis, a common feature is the leadership of the megacities of Beijing and Shanghai. It is well-known that those giant cities have the most presence of science and technology R&D, tech company headquarters, income, and education.