Empowering Education in Western China with AI Technology: A Case Study from Gansu Province

The present study is an exploratory case study of the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital transformation of education throughout Western China, resulting from a summer 2025 social practice project with the No.3 Middle School in Zhenyuan County, Gansu Province. The study analyses AI-based personalized teaching, teacher development, and resource-sharing programmes to argue that these technologies will be critical for providing a relatively fair allocation of teaching resources in an area with extreme imbalances in teaching resources. Such technologies, it is argued, can fulfil a dual role by not only providing a direct interface with the students but also serving as a very effective tool for the professional development of teachers, thereby offering a further mechanism for teaching fairness. The study also discusses certain arising difficulties, such as infrastructural deficiencies, teacher training deficiencies, and a lack of locally specific instructional resources. It concludes with suggestions for addressing these findings.