Needy farmers at Wangzhuang Village, one of the poorest areas in northwestern China, have seen entirely new things on television relayed to this outlying village for the first time.

Wangzhuang Village, located on an area with an elevation of 2,900 meters in Longde County, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Owing to lack of transport facilities, 220 households in the village had to climb over rugged mountains to buy daily essentials and sell what they produce.

Thus far, 60,000 backward villages in rural China have access to television and radio broadcast as Wangzhuang did, said an official with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. He anticipates that additional 100,000 villages with apopulation of 70 million will be able to watch television and listen to radio by the end of this year, thus raising the country's radio and television coverage rate to 92 percent.

Brand-new satellite receivers and launching apparatus have beenerected besides row upon row of low-lying house built with sun-dried mud bricks. Loudspeakers hung on poles at the entrance of villages are rendering programs of advertisements and music.

"We are now able to watch television at our own homes at last,"said the 45-year-old Liu Jingyun with a hearty smile while gazing at the vivid, lively performance shown on television.

"We have learned from television new skills of growing maize under plastic sheet covers and methods of applying fertilizer and insecticides. I think the per-unit output of maize is sure to top 400 kg this year," Liu said.

Television has brought gratifying changes to this small, out-of-the-way village, where farmers began to talk about news from both home and abroad, leaned to speak Putonghua, or standard Chinese pronunciation, and do business as acquired from TV Ads.

At the first dancing ball ever hosted in Wangzhuang Village, some boys and girls learned and imitated the steps of dancers seenfrom TV screens amid hearty laughers of their fellow villagers. Wang Weizhi, the village head, said his village is going to work in cooperation with Fujian Province on east China coast to set up a starch processing workshop. Some villagers will be sent to work there and let more children to study at school this year. "Our beautiful and fond dreams will soon come true," he said.

According to official statistics, as much as 150 million peoplein China's outlying, mountainous areas had practically no access to radio or television in late 1998. And little cultural and educational progress made so far has hindered social and economic growth in these areas.

To gain a turn for the better, the central government has established a special fund worth 250 million yuan (30 million US dollars) to provide all villages in the region with an easy accessto television and radio broadcast by the end of this year.

Zheng Anshe, director of the Broadcasting and Television Bureauof Longde County, said his county government allocated 860,000 yuan (103,600 US dollars) last year to build new TV relay stationsacross the county. Meanwhile, the state has donated 25 sets of satellite receiving equipment and 1,450 television sets to the county.

Expanded television coverage has led to a booming rural consumer market. The number of color TV sets sold rose by 525 in Longde County over the past three months.

According to an official with the State Development Planning Commission, the sales volume of television and radio sets in China's rural areas amounted to 10 billion yuan (1.2 billion US dollars)for this year.

Bao Dake, an American scholar, said recently that the expansionof television industry has help to do away with the seclusion of vast rural areas in western China, broaden ordinary farmers' visions, and increased their expectations and furthered the contacts between China and the outside world.