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The central government is committed to improving the quality of rural roads and extending the network, and is looking for multiple sources of funding to help pay for a major construction project, an official said.

Weng Mengyong, vice-minister of communications, told a high-level forum over the weekend that the ministry was making a concerted effort "to get more financial organizations involved in rural road construction".

If such a breakthrough is made, he said, the process of rural road building can be accelerated.

Zhang Dehua, a ministry official in charge of rural roads, said one approach was asking for loans from policy banks.

Under the plan, local governments are encouraged to use the potential growth of the local economy as security for the loan, he told China Daily in a phone interview yesterday.

"More than a dozen townships have already secured loans from China Development Bank to build roads," he said.

This method of financing was unthinkable in the past, as loans could be secured only on toll roads, Zhang said.

He said the loans would be repaid quickly, as local economies tend to rise rapidly after the development of a good road system.

More than 1.2 million km of roads in rural areas will be built or renovated during the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10). Asphalt and cement roads will link some 7,530 townships and nearly 90,000 administrative villages, Weng Mengyong said at the forum.

Every township nationwide, and most administrative villages in eastern and middle China will be accessible by paved roads by the year 2010, he said.

This year, the ministry plans to use 43 percent of the revenue from motor vehicle purchase tax, about 30 billion yuan ($3.96 billion), on rural road building, Weng said.

In 2000 and 2001, the ministry spent just 3-5 percent of that revenue on rural road construction.

The development of the nation's roads began to accelerate in 2003. Today, roads link more than 98 percent of all townships and more than 86 percent of administrative villages.

Zhang Hongyu, a researcher with the Ministry of Agriculture, hailed the progress, saying at the forum that the increased number of rural roads had helped speed up the mechanization process of agriculture as they allowed machinery such as combine harvesters to be used in a wider range of places and more frequently.

Experts at the forum also agreed that the expanded rural road network had spurred consumption and economic growth, and contributed to the building of a new socialist countryside.

(China Daily July 31, 2007)