With the continuous development and progress in science and technology, information technology, especially the Internet, has become deeply integrated into people's lives. Due to its convenience and low cost, the Internet has been greatly adopted by administrative departments or enterprises as their service platform. The digitization of social participation has brought convenience to people, but with potential unfairness. According to studies regarding the digital divide (Friemel, T.N., 2014；Scheerder, A., van Deursen, A., van Dijk, J., 2017), personal online performances have been correlated with age, gender, education, and income level, which highly influence the social resources available, and the status of individuals in the information society. Researchers found that people with higher social status benefit more from digital engagement than their lower status counterparts. Therefore, inequalities resulting from the digital divide widen the existing social divide and affect people's lives in various ways pertaining to employment, social life, education, political participation, health, and well-being.
With a global ageing trend, ‘grey divide’ and digital inclusiveness for elderly people has attracted much attention from scholars. The seniors’ well-being in the digital age has become a significant cause for concern among researchers. China, as the country with the largest population, is stepping into an ageing society at a rapid rate. The one-child policy from the late 1970s has led to a significant decline in the birth rate, which accelerated the ageing trend (State Information Center of China,2015). For one thing, the lack of ICTs infrastructure in China, which leads to a low Internet penetration rate, is considered the primary cause of digital divide among the elderly (He & Liu,2015). Driven by factors such as Internet penetration, income levels, and education levels, the digital access divide between urban and rural areas is particularly acute. For another, an ‘Internet +’ society has been advocated by the Chinese government (the State Council of China, 2015), which entails all industries to be integrated with the Internet under the trend of ‘Internet of Things’. Public authorities and private services turn to the Internet as their service medium due to its high efficiency, convenience, and low cost (Friemel, T.N., 2014;Van Deursen, 2017). All of these make the aged population being lack of digital literacy and facing difficulties of social participation in a digital-based society.
Researchers have made efforts on the determinants of seniors’ adoption of Internet, but most of their achievements are confined to western countries. Thus, this article aims to provide a unique insight into the digital divide among the elderly in China, which has currently been relatively blank in the field of digital divide research. It will explore three research questions of ‘grey’ divide among seniors in China by questioning their digital preferences and literacy, figuring out the impacts of digital engagements on their later lives, and discussing measures to bridge the ‘divide’.