Families in one of the poorest areas in Northwest China have watched television for the first time recently.

Wangzhuang Village, 2,900 metres above sea level in Longde County, in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, is a remote and almost inaccessible place.

The 220 families there have to climb over rugged mountains to get to shops to buy essentials and sell what they produce.

Wangzhuang Village is now one of the 60,000 remote villages in rural China with access to television and radio broadcasts, an official with the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television said.

A further 100,000 villages with a population of 70 million will be able to watch television and listen to the radio by the end of this year, he added, raising the country's broadcast coverage rate to 92 per cent.

Brand new satellite receivers have been erected beside row upon row of low-lying houses built with sun- dried mud bricks. Loudspeakers hung on poles at the entrance of villages broadcast advertisements and music.

"We are now able to watch television in our own homes at last," said 45-year-old Liu Jingyun gazing at the performance showing on the box.

"We learned from television new skills for growing maize under plastic sheet covers and methods of applying fertilizer and insecticides." Liu said.

Television has brought gratifying changes to this village, where farmers began to talk about news from both home and abroad, learned to speak Putonghua, or standard Chinese pronunciation, and do business learned from TV Ads.

Wang Weizhi, the village head, said his village was going to work in co-operation with Fujian Province on the East China coast to set up a starch processing workshop. Some villagers will be sent to work there.

According to official statistics, as many as 150 million people in China's outlying mountainous areas had practically no access to radio or television in late 1998.

And the little cultural and educational progress made so far has hindered social and economic growth in these areas.

The central government has established a special fund of 250 million yuan (US$30 million ) to provide all villages in the region with easy access to television and radio broadcasts by the end of this year.

Zheng Anshe, director of the Broadcasting and Television Bureau of Longde County, said his county government allocated 860,000 yuan (US$103,600) last year to build new TV relay stations across the county.

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 (US$1.2 billion) for last year.