To: jmhollen who wrote (5630 ) 1/15/2000 4:05:00 PM From: jmhollen Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 7209
LGOVites FYI:"....From the jus' so's ya know Department...." :China's remarkable infrastructure developments 27-09-99 China has had some remarkable infrastructure developments, in its postal service, telecommunications, and transport since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. The following facts and figures show the progress China has made: In 1949, China had only 26,000 post offices, but the figure went to 100, 000 last year, more than 20,000 of which provide a wide range of postal services. In 1998, the postal service handled 6.5 bn pieces of domestic mail, 90 mm pieces of mail to Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and foreign countries, 97 mm domestic parcels, and 570,000 international parcels. China has express service to more than 200 countries and regions. The telecommunications network has an estimated 1 mm km of optical fibre cables to all provincial capitals and over 90 % of the cities and counties. All provinces have satellite telecommunications ground stations and more than 20,000 satellite telecommunication lines. In 1998, China was second in the world in handling capacity of its switchboards, with 140 mm lines. All switchboards in county-level cities or higher were program-controlled. There were 90 mm telephone subscribers and 30 telephones for each 100 people, and nearly 70 % of urban families had telephones. The number of mobile phone subscribers rose to 24 mm by the end of last year, the number of pager users was 39 mm. China now ranks third in the world in mobile phone subscribers. China has 58,000 km of railways and 86 % of its locomotives are internal-combustion or electric. China has 1.28 mm km of roads and 8,700 km of highways. It has airline flights to 33 countries and a fleet of ocean- going ships that have a 24-million-ton capacity in all and that go to 1,200 ports and more than 170 countries and regions. China has 486 deep-water berths, with a total handling capacity of 11 mm containers. Shanghai Port has become one of the ten largest container ports in the world. China also has 23,000 km of gas and oil pipelines.