There are about 1,000 major Web sites in China and digital libraries can be created by sending these Web pages via satellite to local servers, Li said. The investment required to set up systems like this would not exceed several hundred renminbi, or less than US$100, and would consist of an antenna to receive the satellite broadcast and a computer based on a domestically manufactured processor and a 120G-byte hard disk.

By this modest investment, Chinese farmers will get access to a huge amount of information, Li said.

Zhu Hua, chief engineer of Guizhou province's Information Industry Department of Guizhou, said he found Li's proposal enlightening. Zhu said determining how to bring IT access to rural areas depends to a large degree on the geography and other factors in each region. Because the economy and infrastructure in western China lags far behind that of the country's eastern areas, new strategies for expanding the use of IT in western China must be developed instead of copying what has been done in the east.

Zhu also expressed the hope that the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which oversees the .cn top-level domain name and conducts a twice-yearly survey of Internet use in China, will begin tracking the number of Internet users in rural China versus the number in urban areas. The availability of this information would be insightful and support efforts to expand rural Internet use, he said.