Are mailboxes still necessary?
- By Wu Jin
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E-mail China.org.cn, August 2, 2016
Zhang Li has spent more than 30 years working as a postman in the countryside at the western mountainous area in Henan Province. During the past three decades, the number of handwritten letters packed in his bag has plummeted from 70-80 to two to three pieces, and those letters are usually messed up with the advertising papers inside the mailboxes.
In the past century, most of the handwritten letters were sent between the elderly and the men enrolled in the army, said Zhang, who was in charge of the mail service covering 22 villages. During those years, Zhang would also spend his time reading letters to illiterate seniors.
The decline of the handwritten letter isn't exclusive to rural China.
In a post office in Beijing, the handwritten letters and postcards delivered from mailboxes are no more than 200 — much less than the bills and advertisements posted at more than 5,000 in total each day.
Chen Liangjun, an official from the post office administration in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, said that about half of the 2,000 mailboxes in Ningbo are vacant and the rest usually had only two or three letters.
In the end of the 1980s when the cell phones were not so popular, the mailboxes in Ningbo were often crammed with letters and post cards during festive occasions, Chen recalled.
Although the fashion of handwritten letters is losing its charm, the post officers in Ningbo are still required to check each mailbox every day and their routes are overseen by an app installed.
According to the State Post Bureau, the number of mailboxes nationwide has been reduced for three straight years from 2013. There had been a total of 130,000 mailboxes by the end of 2015, 13,000 less than that of a year earlier.
Additionally, the price of mail deliveries, which was 0.8 yuan for a letter weighed within 100 grams inside the city or town and 1.2 yuan out of town have little changed since the price adjustments implemented in 2006.
At the same time, the letter volume from 2013 to 2015 had dropped respectively by 10.4, 11.5 and 18.3 percent.
"The diminishing size of the postal items is exacerbated by unchanged mail prices, the shrinking businesses and the increasing costs of labor, vehicles and management," Chen said.
According to Postal Law, the country should reimburse the post offices for both their ordinary and special services.
Chen said, however, that the funds are far from sufficient. Therefore, the post offices have to launch banking and other spinoff businesses under the preferential policies of the country.
While the decline of the post office services are looming large, business of express deliveries are enjoying a sharp rise.
According to the State Post Bureau, business transactions of the express deliveries has grown by 61.6, 51.9 and 48 percent year on year from 2013 to 2015, and the revenue of the business had increased by 36.6, 41.9 and 35.4 percent at the same time. The revenue of the express delivery last year in total constituted 68.6 percent of the entire post service industry.
Businesses of the privately-owned express deliveries companies like S.F. Express, ZTO and YTO Express are expanding fast as the aggregate revenue last year in the private sector hit 224.6 billion yuan (US$33.86 billion), seven times the size of the total income of the state-owned post offices.
According to the Several Opinions on Promoting the Development of Express Delivery Business issued by the State Council last year, the businesses in the sector are expected to cover each spot of the countryside and create a business size of 50 billion packages in a year with the revenue totaling 800 billion yuan by 2020.
Despite the prevalent express delivery services which may cause the ordinary mail service to die a natural death, people working in the post offices are struggling to maintain the traditional ways of communication.
"Handwritten letters, as a way of traditional communication, will continue to live on," said Chen.
Postmen like Zhang agree that in at least 30 years the traditional letters will still be welcomed and are not supposed to follow in the footsteps of telegrams that have been completely abandoned since 2000 in the country.
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