China's highway length in rural areas has reached 2.9 million kilometers. 99.6 percent of townships, 92 percent of administrative villages have had highroads.

This is learned from a symposium on China's rural highways held in Taiyuan, capital of north China's Shanxi Province.

The latest statistics provided by the Ministry of Communications show 285.8 billion yuan of investment has been put into construction of rural highways and 463,000 kilometers of highways have been built in rural areas.

Chinese vice communications minister Feng Zhenglin said over the past two years, China saw unprecedented development of rural highways, in terms of investment, scale of the projects and growth rate.

Zhang Xiaoqiang, deputy director of National Development and Reform Commission said the coordinated development of the trunk lines, highway networks and rural highways is a requirement of a continued development of transportation. Without the modernization of rural highways there would be no modernization of China's communications and transportation. With the goal of establishing a more convenient, efficient and safer modern transportation system, during the eleventh Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010), China will speed up improving rural highway communications, improve service substantially so as to keep pace with the socio-economic development in rural areas.

By People's Daily Online