FROM  FACELIFT  TO  THOROUGH  CHANGES

In the early years of the New China, the postal offices and other components of the infrastructure were on the whole insufficient both in size and standard. The business volume increased by some 40times from the rarely 1950s to the rarely eighties ,but service only doubled in the same period of time.

In keeping pace with the rapid growth and satisfying the requirement of mechanization and automation in the service ,the postal and telecom departments and operators since the 1980s have been investing heavily in a large-scale construction of pivotal network and mail processing centers. both of the Beijing railway station postal center and the west Beijing railway station mail processing center cover a space of about 100000 square meters.

Since the mid-1990s ,a group of post offices at the prefecture level have been rebuilt into all processing centers in accordance with the strategic system of central bureaus. The rebuilding programs have by now resulted in many large and medium-sized cities.

Statistics of late 1998 showed that the floor space of production had grow to 20.23 million square meters, with the number of post offices of varying sizes totaling 84,134.With much of the production and processing being mechanized and automated, working conditions have exceedingly improved.