On July 26th, China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom) inaugurated a demonstration project to build information demonstration stations in 1,000 Chinese towns and 10,000 Chinese advanced villages within a year. After successfully running pilot projects in Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Anhui Provinces, China Telecom decided to launch this demonstration project nationwide in order to promote China��s construction of new informationized socialist countryside.

It is said that supported by China Telecom's rural service branches scattering in Chinese towns and villages nationwide, the demonstration project aims to provide Chinese peasants with vocal, short message and internet services and other kinds of information, which are related to agricultural technologies, agricultural markets and education, etc. In this way, the project will build a digital bridge for Chinese peasants in order to improve their life.

In the meantime, China United Telecommunications Corporation Limited (China Unicom) also launched its agro-informationization project -- "Agriculture Space Time". China Unicom plans to add another 5,000 information stations to the current 746 existing agricultural information stations in order to provide services to 5 million rural households. As a result, tens of millions of Chinese peasants will benefit from this project.

When carrying out the project of "Agriculture Space Time", China Unicom will integrate its communication resources covering a large number of Chinese villages and send agricultural information to Chinese peasants in the form of short messages, etc by means of cell phone, mobile internet and others. Chinese Unicom will provide its rural users with information about agricultural product demands and supply, price analysis of agricultural products and other information services closely relating to rural development. This project will solve two major issues in agro-informationization, namely, sources of rural information and "last kilometer" of information transmission.

By People's Daily Online