Lying in north China's Taihang Mountains, Kangjiayan Village was connected with the outside world by a dirt and muddy road prior to 2001.

At that time, even with the help of donkey-drawn carts, it took villagers three hours to carry water from the entrance to the village to its center.

The rugged road also troubled villagers' exchange with the people outside, leading to the fact that the village did not see any marriage for 18 years. The oldest bachelor in the village was 63 years of age.

Wuxiang County, where Kangjiayan Village was located, used to be headquarters of China's Eighth Route Army during China's resistance war against Japanese aggression from 1937 to 1945 and is now among the underdeveloped regions in China's countryside.

Highway construction began in 2001 in this county. When the blacktop roads were paved to Kangjiayan village, some villagers there, who had never been out of the village in their lives, said"we feel like that we are in the capital Beijing. "

Over the past few years, Kangjiayan's story has been repeated in many other Chinese rural areas.

As an agricultural country with 900, 000 million farmers, China did witness a long period of poor rural infrastructure, particularly the road system.

Take north China's Shanxi Province, which is mostly located in the Loess Plateau, the country's third largest plateau.

"Before 2001, 20 percent towns and 60 percent villages were not linked with blacktop roads, which brought great difficulties to the transportation of local mineral resources, forests and fruit to the outside," said Wang Xiaolin, director of Shanxi Communications Department. "Some farmers were even crippled or lost their lives after falling down on those uneven roads. "

Faced with these challenges, Ministry of Communications put forward a strategy in 2003, aiming at "making blacktop and cement roads available in countryside." Since then, governments at various levels began to invest heavily in rural road construction.

In two years from 2003 to 2005, the country spent a total of 50 billion yuan (about US$6.17 billion) on constructing highways in the countryside, increasing the rural blacktop and cement road length by 176,000 km, which was almost an equal to the road length constructed in 53 years beginning from the founding of the new China in 1949.

Roads connecting county centers, towns and villages now total 480,000 km, 950,000 km and 1.47 million km respectively.

Vice Minister of Communications Feng Zhenglin said recently at a seminar on China's rural highways, which was held in Taiyuan, capital city of Shanxi Province.

Data released by the ministry showed that the total length of China's rural highways has reached 2.9 million kilometers -- 72.5 times as long as the Equator--connecting 99.6 percent of the township centers and 92 percent villages nationwide.

Construction of rural roads has dramatically improved the transportation in the countryside, speeding up the transformation from traditional agriculture to high-value-added agriculture that is oriented at market, experts said.

In the second year after the completion of a highway winding through those poor villages in Luliang Mountain in Shanxi, a total of 700, 000 poverty-stricken population there increased their annual per-capita income by 150 yuan (US$18.5).

In the southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, a highway connecting two counties gave an impetus to the boom of the recreational villas on the two sides of the highway.

"The newly-built cement road in front of my house made my trip to the county much easier," said Guang Cun'e, a middle-aged woman in Baliu village in Shanxi Province. She has to frequently go to the county as she delivers tax grain and sells vegetables there.

The road construction did not put increased financial burdens on farmers as the funds were largely granted by governments and supported by rural communities and social circles, according to the Ministry of Communications.

But some experts pointed out that neither the scale or the quality of China's rural roads on the whole was advanced enough to meet the demands of rural economic and social development.

Early this year, the State Council gratified a program for rural road construction, a special plan guiding the transportation development in five years from 2006 to 2010, which experts hail as contributive to the sustained and rapid development of rural roads.

The central government will spend about 100 billion yuan (about US$12 billion) on rural road construction in the coming five years, said Zhang Xiaoqiang, deputy director of the State Development and Reform Commission, China's economy planning body.

Currently 167 towns and 49,339 villages nationwide are still not linked with highways, according to the ministry.

(Xinhua News Agency October 28, 2005)