Section 3 Improvement of Post Services

The postal sectors, with the principle of serving the people, had always been directing their efforts at Providing "Speed, Accuracy, Security and Convenience " services. Considering it a top priority to fulfill the communications needs of the Party and the state, they were heart and soul in providing convenience for the customers. Various measures had been taken in many postal sectors over the country to improve services. In these activities some advanced workers and units have come to the fore. Batudalai, a national model worker, was one of them. He was a township postman in the Suniteyiu Banner of the inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. During the past 23 years, he had delivered 975000 pieces of mails, newspapers and periodicals. The herdsmen all called him "a walking post office on the grassland" because he often received and sent ordinary letters and registered letters as well as subscribed newspapers and periodicals for others. Also among those advanced workers were 9 postmen in the Panlong Branch Post Office of the Nanxin County, Nanchong prefecture, Sichuan Province. They went to the farms to offer postal services for the farmers there, therefore the customers "don't have to go to town to collect cash and don't have to be on the rush to send a letter". They had once in 3 years delivered 25000 pieces of remittances, parcels and special registered mails, which was warmly welcomed by the customers for the great saving of their working hours.

During this period, the postal sectors carried out a wide range of labor emulation to improve the postal service and quality. In 1958, the experience of service improvement of the Dongsi Branch Post Office in Beijing was widely disseminated in the national postal system. The postal sectors set up an upsurge of competing with, learning from and catching up with the advanced, and further called on the masses to take part in the "five-good" and "six-competing" emulation campaigns. The "five-good" one included good manner in serving the customers, good status in eliminating mistakes and malfunctions, good accomplishment of time-limited targets, good retainment of tidiness and cleanness, and good coordination and cooperation. The "six-competing" one included competition in service manner quality, coordination, efficiency, frugality and tidiness. Further more, they developed a streamlined coordination competition on the basis of the above with the purpose to raise the communications quality and labor productivity. This movement effectively improved the communications quality of the whole network by means of organizing close coordination between higher and lower links in accordance with postal delivery procedure, instead of traditionally organizing competitions among different sectors and professions.

While organizing a wide range of labor emulation, the postal sectors also organized workers to take part in technical and skill competitions. In 1959, post offices of all the provinces and cities proposed to have competitions, performances and summaries simultaneously and therefore to turn the process of technical performance matches into the process of summarizing and spreading advanced experience and technological innovations. On the National Post and Telecommunications Technical Performance Match Conference held by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications in the March of 1960, more than 90 sets of advanced experience were worked out among which 31 sets were related with postal services. During the time period from 1964 to 1965, responding to the call of "Industries Learn from Daqing, Agriculture Learn from Dazhai and the Whole Country Learn from the PLA", there appeared a upsurge of training in basic skills with the requirements of being "red" in thinking, resilient in style of work, proficient in techniques and perfect at working skills.

According to incomplete statistics, 70 to 90 per cent of the total number of workers in the postal system participated in the skill practices during this period. In the upsurge of skill Practices, the workers worked hard day and night, summed up many individual and complete sets of operation experience, improved and invented many tools, and therefore raised the working efficiency and service quality.