China will accelerate rural highway construction to bring farmers closer to outside markets and raise their incomes, an official said in Taiyuan at a symposium.

Vice-Minister of Communications Hu Xijie told the Symposium on Hastening Rural Highway Construction that the first national development program for rural highway construction was being considered.

A major task was to complete the construction of county-level highroads and establish a network that could link every town and village, he said.

Rural highway construction in China was quite unbalanced, he said. In the economically advanced east, existing highroads had to be further improved to foster a much broader traffic network. Money permitting, freeways or other roads of better quality could be built.

But in the backward west, priority was to let farmers travel on highroads and transport their farm produce to outside markets. Therefore, good quality asphalt roads needed to be secured for the time being.

Hu said that a nationwide highroad construction scheme would come into being within next two to three years.

By then, rural highroads would be "gold links" between cities and counties to boost the country's economic development, he said.