With the newly-installed MMDS antenna, Fan Junjie, a farmer of Pingluo County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, is able to access to six more TV channels at home.

Currently, 81 percent of the rural households in Pingluo County are able to increase their TV channels from two to eight, thanks to a nationwide project of "extending TV and radio coverage to every village".

Zhang Lining, vice director of the provincial radio, film and TV administration, said China's vast rural areas are lagging far behind cities in terms of access to radio and TV services. In Ningxia, urban residents have access to 25 to 40 TV programs, while most rural households just have two TV channels with blurry images.

But on the other hand, the vast rural population has shown a growing appetite for varied TV programs. By the end of 2004, every hundred rural households in Ningxia possess 91 color TV sets, a rate 85 percent higher than what was reported in 2000.

Zhang said Ningxia allocates 5.75 million yuan (709,000 US dollars) annually to carry out the project. Eighty percent of the villages in the region are expected to have at least eight TV channels for free by the end of this year.

Ningxia is just an epitome of the country's efforts to give rural viewers wider access to TV and radio programs.

In Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in the south, a pilot region of the TV coverage extension program, 5,995 villages have had more TV programs to choose from in the recent two years.

The central government has vowed to provide at least eight TV channels before the yearend to 93,926 villages which have newly got constant power supply.

During the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), 90 percent of China's villages will receive all major programs of the central and provincial televisions, said Zhang Haitao, vice director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

Zhang said his organization will work to diversify the TV programs for rural residents in years to come.

China started the project of "extending TV and radio coverage to every village" from 1998 and has invested 2 billion yuan (US$246.6million) in it ever since.
 
(Xinhua News Agency September 28, 2005)