Hand action recognition is an important part of intelligent monitoring, human–computer interaction, robotics and other fields. Compared with other methods, the hand action recognition method using skeleton information can ignore the error effects caused by complex background and movement speed changes, and the computational cost is relatively small. The spatial-temporal graph convolution networks (ST-GCN) model has excellent performance in the field of skeleton-based action recognition. In order to solve the problem of the root joint and the further joint not being closely connected, resulting in a poor hand-action-recognition effect, this paper firstly uses the dilated convolution to replace the standard convolution in the temporal dimension. This is in order to process the time series features of the hand action video, which increases the receptive field in the temporal dimension and enhances the connection between features. Then, by adding non-physical connections, the connection between the joints of the fingertip and the root of the finger is established, and a new partition strategy is adopted to strengthen the hand correlation of each joint point information. This helps to improve the network’s ability to extract the spatial-temporal features of the hand. The improved model is tested on public datasets and real scenarios. The experimental results show that compared with the original model, the 14-category top-1 and 28-category top-1 evaluation indicators of the dataset have been improved by 4.82% and 6.96%. In the real scene, the recognition effect of the categories with large changes in hand movements is better, and the recognition results of the categories with similar trends of hand movements are poor, so there is still room for improvement.