LANZHOU -- Television is as indispensable as oxygen for Li Fuqiang, a 49-year-old herdsman in Gansu, an underdeveloped province in northwest China.

"Watching TV is the best way for me and my wife to kill the free time we have after grazing and get to know what happens elsewhere," said Li, whose family prefers news and legal channels as well as the station broadcast from Hunan Province, where their son attends college.

"In days without a satellite TV receiver, drinking and sleeping were all we had to do with our spare time," Li recalled of his humdrum life seven years ago. "No entertainment, and people felt bored and lonely."

Li's home village Songmutan is located in a remote part of Sunan county, which is mostly inhabited by China's Yugur minority and has a population of about 12,000. A bumpy 35-kilometer packway connects his village with a town in Sunan county, which is 600 km away from the provincial capital of Lanzhou and 1,800 km from the nation's heart of Beijing.

The distance and steep, rugged mountains prevented television signals from wireless transmission towers from reaching the village for years.

But things began to change for Li and most other villagers living in China's vast remote rural areas in the 1990s, when a project was initiated by the central government to help all farmers and herdsmen get access to TV and broadcast programs.

From 2006 to 2010, 4,534 DBS (direct broadcast satellite) receivers were installed in 4,534 households in 76 villages of Sunan county with an investment of 1.63 million yuan (259,000 U.S. dollars), said Yan Wenchang, director of the local administration of radio, film and television.

Li's DBS receiver, which the herdsman have dubbed the "pot" due to its shape, sits in the corner of the yard. Inside his room, the TV plays with high-definition picture quality.

All the villagers bought the receivers with an STB (set top box) for just 100 yuan, allowing them to receive 44 satellite TV channels, said An Yujun, secretary of the Songmutan village branch of the Communist Party of China.

With a diameter of 40 centimeters, the delicate "pots" are convenient for the herdsman to take with them when they are grazing. Whether at home or on the pasture, they can stay informed about goings-on at home and abroad as well as learn some things about grassland farming, said An.

Apart from Gansu, local governments across the country are aiming to "enable every rural family to have access to TV programs." Since last September, more than 2,730 solar-powered TV sets have been sent to herdsmen in Hotan prefecture in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Yan Wenchang said the government is exploring more routes for expanding broadcasting and satellite TV coverage in rural areas and enhancing the cultural product services available to rural residents.

"The project is moving on. By 2015, all herdsmen in Sunan will be able to watch TV programs via DBS receivers," he said.