BEIJING -- China's State Post Bureau (SPB) is separating government functions
from its business practices, and its mail delivery services will become more
market-oriented.
In a recent circular, the bureau announces the formation of provincial
agencies in Zhejiang, Shandong, Sichuan, Shaanxi and Tianjin in the name of Post
Management Bureau. And other bureaus of the kind will be set up successively.
With staff members mainly coming from traditional state-owned post bureaus,
these re-organized management bureaus are under the direct administration of the
SPB instead of the jurisdiction of local governments.
They are responsible for implementing China's laws and regulations on the
management of postal industry, working out related polices and standards, and
supervising the development of postal market.
They also take charge of special postal services such as confidential
correspondence, correspondence for compulsory military servicemen, distribution
of the newspapers and periodicals owned by China's Communist Party, and the
delivery of reading matters for the blind.
In the meantime, profit-making postal services will be put into a national
postal corporation which competes with other companies in the postal industry,
including the delivery businesses from abroad.
Since China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, a number of
overseas postal delivery giants including UPS, FedEx and DHL have tried to
expand their presence in China.
Under traditional mechanism, state-owned post bureaus stand as both a judge
and a player, and foreign competitors as well as private companies are
disadvantaged.
A senior SPB official told Xinhua that the reform is carried out in line with
the demand of China's economic reform.
A similar institutional reform occurred in 1998 when the Ministry of
Information Industry was established to replace former Ministry of Electronics
and Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications whose administrative functions were
also mixed with those of market-related services.
What followed was the government-led separation of the monopolistic China
telecommunication conglomerate into three independent corporations and more
licenses to telecom operators, which has led to nowadays opener and brisker
telecommunication market.
SPB Annual Report said that China's post bureaus raked in aggregated 5.03
billion yuan last year, up 5.3 percent over that of 2004, and they delivered
nearly 7.35 billion mails.