Background: Persistent quality gaps between urban and rural schools hamper China’s educational equity goals. Cloud School Community (CSC) models promise precise resource sharing, yet empirical evidence remains limited.

Methods: A mixed‑methods design combined (i) a three‑province policy scan, (ii) analysis of 87 million lesson visits from two provincial cloud platforms, and (iii) 54 semi‑structured stakeholder interviews. Latency and engagement were analysed with mixed‑effects ANOVA, while thematic coding captured governance mechanisms.

Results: Optimised content‑delivery networks reduced mean urban‑to‑rural classroom latency from 183 ms to 58 ms. Joint lesson‑preparation “Studios” correlated with a 21 % rise in rural lesson‑quality scores (r = .64, p < .01). Cross‑school credit incentives yielded the greatest uptick in lesson updates (β = 0.28, p < .001).

Conclusion: CSC is technically feasible and socio‑institutionally sustainable when edge‑optimised networks, tri‑partite governance, diversified resource ecologies and teacher‑centred incentives cohere under robust data‑security regimes. Findings inform policy frameworks aiming for high‑quality, balanced basic education by 2030.