The Chinese government has been working to bridge the wide "digital divide" between urban and rural areas caused by imbalances in Internet access and information literacy.

A e-governance trial site in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

In China's underdeveloped countryside, the lack of popularity of the Internet, which has long been recognized as a critical base for e-governance, has presented considerable challenges to the government in delivering effective public services, said officials and experts at the 4th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance being held from Oct. 25 to 28 in Beijing.

The emphasis of good e-governance should be on creating a more equitable society by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor and eliminating persistent poverty, said the conference' s general co-chair, Peter Haddawy, also director of the International Institution for Software Technology at the United Nations University.

China has more than 700 million rural residents, accounting for over half the country' s total population. About 15 percent of rural residents managed to surf the Internet once in the second half of 2009, which is one-third the number of urban net users, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) this year.

In addition, "the development of the Internet in China' s countryside has begun to slow down" , the report said, implying the possibility of a widening 'digital divide' between rural and urban areas.

Despite several efforts in recent years, weak infrastructure and poor education levels of the rural population have continued to hamper the promotion of the Internet in the countryside, said Du Weicheng, deputy head of the Information Center at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Therefore, the Chinese government was now exploring different and more pragmatic methods to improve e-governance in these areas, rather than merely trying to spread the use of the Internet, Du said.

"In the past five years, we' ve been encouraging our local sectors to make the best use of telephones and televisions -- the traditional platforms that have allowed the sharing of agricultural policies and information," Du said, adding that he found hotlines very popular among farmers.

By 2009, more than 96 percent of Chinese rural households had access to mobile phones and televisions, according to the Annual Report on China' s E-Government Development in 2010.

"In the near future, we' ll optimize our cell phone-based customized short message services to cater to the farmers' need for information on supply and demand, as well as for technical counseling," Du said.