Chinese vice premier Huang Ju
on Sunday made a telephone call to an on-the-spot meeting on
telephone reaching village, congratulating on the use of telephone
in 96 percent of Chinese villages.
The Ministry of Information Industry on Sunday announced that up
to now, China's 96 percent of administrative villages, or 49,000
villages, have access to telephone, at an on-the-spot
telephone-reaching-village meeting, held in Yan'an city of
northwest Shannxi Province.
Huang spoke highly of the achievement via telephone and required
the departments concerned to further improve rural communication
facilities.
He said China entered a crucial period of building up a well-off
society in an all-round way. The fifth plenary meeting of the 16th
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (
CPC) had put the work of dealing with issues relating to
agriculture, rural areas and farmers on the top of work agenda.
Speeding up the construction of rural communication facilities
is one of the important measures to solve the issues on
agriculture, rural areas and farmers, an important responsibility
for governments and an obligation for communication departments, he
said.
"Over recent years, rural communication development made great
progress, as more than 40,000 administrative villages have
telephones. The use of telephone will help farmers broaden horizon
and have easy access to information," Huang said.
Huang also had a talk with Song Youfu, farmer in Ansai county,
Yan'an city, Shannxi Province, over telephone. Huang asked in
detail the local economic development and the living status of
local farmers, as well as the development of local communication
and telecommunication industries.
He said the government would continue to stipulate favorable
policies for boosting rural communication facilities, so that an
increasing number of farmers could afford using telephone and the
gap between city and countryside could be narrowed.
(Xinhua News Agency November 28, 2005)