The paper, titled Network 'Interlocking' and Rural Family Entrepreneurship Choice: Towards Achieving Common Prosperity, was published as the first author.

The paper explores how the internet, as a new force, can promote entrepreneurship in traditional rural society. Using data from the 2018 China Family Tracking Survey, the paper uses the counterfactual total effect decomposition method to completely separate the pure technical contribution and the social relationship network effects of internet entrepreneurship to verify the interlocking mechanism between the internet and social relationship networks. The study found that the internet empowers rural family entrepreneurship, but the network interlocking mechanism only manifests between the internet and weak social relationship networks, with strong social relationship networks only playing a pure mediating role. In addition, the paper further analyzes the heterogeneity of the interlocking mechanism in the context of common prosperity.

The results of the heterogeneity analysis show that in the survival-type entrepreneurship effect of the internet, pure technical contribution plays a major role, while in the opportunity-type entrepreneurship effect of the internet, weak social relationship networks play an amplifier role. For rural families with poor health status, the internet only shows pure technical contribution, while for poor and vulnerable rural families facing the problem of the digital divide, the entrepreneurship effect of the internet is not significant. In the increasingly atomized rural society, it is important to focus on the development of social organizations to expand weak social relationship networks of rural families, and to achieve a dual-wheel empowerment of organizational systems and technologies to promote rural family entrepreneurship and pave the way for rural revitalization and common prosperity with local characteristics.

China Rural Economy is a top-level journal in the field of agricultural economics in China, and is classified as an A-level publication.

(Written by Wang Haolin; Reviewed by Peng Xianmei)