China is set to develop around 10,000 key rural towns early this century in order to raise the social and economic development of rural areas to a new level.

A senior official with the Ministry of Construction said today that China had developed more than 55,000 small rural towns by theend of 1999, which are home to 70,000 specialized and wholesale markets with accumulative annual trade volume of more than 500 billion yuan.

Small rural towns account for approximately 25 percent of China's total gross domestic product and are rapidly emerging as important bases for boosting rural economic development, the official added.

He noted that township enterprises in these towns, more than one million of them each with an annual output value well above 500 million yuan, employ over 150 million farmers and contribute over 70 percent to the country's total rural output value.

Township employers will be able to hire an average of seven to eight million rural laborers annually in the coming years, he said,adding that the rapidly increasing number of small towns will not only help absorb large numbers of surplus rural laborers, but willalso stimulate efforts to restructure agriculture.

Statistics show that some 60 percent of the country's 20 million township enterprises are concentrated in small rural towns,and that a large number of enterprise groups in developed rural towns have annual output values of over one billion yuan.