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

The rugged road got in the way of villagers' exchanges with outsiders. The village has not witnessed a marriage for 18 years. The oldest bachelor in the village is 63 years old.

Wuxiang County, where Kangjiayan Village is located, used to be the headquarters of China's Eighth Route Army during China's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression from 1937 to 1945. It is now in one of many underdeveloped rural regions.

Highway construction began in 2001. When the roads were paved all the way to Kangjiayan, some residents that had never left the village, said: "We feel like we are in the capital Beijing."

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

As an agricultural nation with 900 million farmers, China has endured long periods with very poor rural infrastructure, particularly in terms of roads.

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

"Before 2001, 20 percent of towns and 60 percent of villages were not linked with asphalt 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 crippled or lost their lives after falling down on those uneven roads."

Faced with these challenges, the Ministry of Communications put forward a strategy in 2003 aiming at "making asphalt and cement roads available in the countryside." Since then, governments at various levels have been investing heavily in rural road construction.

In the last two years the country has spent 50 billion yuan (US$6.17 billion) on constructing highways in the countryside, increasing the rural asphalt and cement road length by 176,000 kilometres, which is almost equal to the road length constructed in the previous 53 years since the founding of the new China in 1949.

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

Data released by the Ministry of Communications shows 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 of villages nationwide.

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

In the second year after the completion of a highway winding through poor villages in Luliang Mountain in Shanxi, 700,000 of the poverty-stricken population increased their annual per capita income by 150 yuan (US$18.50).

In southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, a highway connecting two counties sparked a boom in recreational villas along 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 from Baliu Village in Shanxi Province. She frequently has to go to the county as she delivers grain and sells vegetables there.

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

But some experts point out neither the scale nor the quality of China's rural roads is sufficient to meet the demands of rural economic and social development.

Early this year, the State Council ratified a program for rural road construction, a special plan guiding transportation development from 2006 to 2010, which experts hail as contributing to the sustained and rapid development of the rural road network.

The central government will spend 100 billion yuan (US$12 billion) on rural road construction in the next five years, according to Zhang Xiaoqiang, deputy director of the State Development and Reform Commission, the economic planning body.

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

(China Daily November 9, 2005)