In the year 2009, the Rural Reading Room program made a lot of progress in China's countryside. Considered to be one of the country's top five cultural initiatives, the program has set up reading rooms in more than 40 percent of Chinese villages.

All of the nearly 300-thousand reading rooms contain more than 2,000 copies of books, and maintain a subscription to over ten newspapers and periodicals.

Local farmers' had a say in selecting the titles. Each reading room costs about 20-thousand yuan RMB. And so far, the central and local governments have invested over 5-billion yuan for the program, which aims to set up reading rooms in ALL of the 640-thousand villages in rural China.