China

Posts and telecommunications

Posts and telecommunications were established rapidly in the 1950s and ’60s. By 1952 the principal posts and telecommunications network centred on Beijing, and links to all large cities had been established. Great progress was made in improving the postal service under the First Five-Year Plan. Postal service was also developed in the rural areas. Besides extending rural postal routes, the problem of delivering mail to places below the county level was solved by enlisting the aid of the population. From 1954 onward a system of mail delivery by rural postal workers was tried in agricultural cooperatives, and in 1956 this system was extended throughout the country. By 1959 the national postal network was complete. Express postal service was introduced in 1980.

When the People’s Republic was established in 1949, China had only a rudimentary telecommunications system, limited largely to the eastern coastal cities, the Nanjing region, and a few interior cities. Work quickly got under way to repair and expand the system, and from 1956 telecommunications routes were extended more rapidly. The same lines were used for both telegraphic and telephone service to increase the efficiency of the communication system, and Teletype and television broadcast services were also added. By 1963 telephone wire linked Beijing to the large cities and the capitals of all provinces and autonomous regions, and capitals in turn were connected to the administrative seats of the counties, smaller municipalities, and larger market towns.

By the 1970s, radio telecommunications equipment was beginning to replace wire lines, and microwave and satellite transmissions were soon introduced; China launched its first television-broadcast satellite in 1986. The pace of telecommunications growth and technology upgrading increased even more rapidly after 1990, especially as fibre-optics systems and digital technology were installed. China’s telecommunications services were further enhanced from 1997, when Hong Kong’s highly advanced systems were acquired. In the late 1990s, foreign companies were allowed to invest in the country’s telecommunications sector, further encouraging growth. Notable has been the tremendous increase in cellular phone use; China became the world leader in the early 21st century, in terms of number of subscribers.

Despite these advances, China’s telecommunications infrastructure has not been able to keep up with demand. A large proportion of the country’s population still has little or no access even to basic telephone service. Although the number of cellular phones has grown enormously, surpassing that for standard (i.e., landline) telephones in 2003, the overall ratio of phones per capita has nonetheless remained much smaller than it is for the developed countries. Internet use has also increased dramatically. Cheng-Siang Chen Kenneth G. Lieberthal The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica