Development of China's Telecom Industry in 4 Decades

Photo taken on May 10, 1983 shows children making phone call with parents at a public phone booth in central China's Henan Province. [Xinhua/Lyu Guoxing]

More than four decades of sound economic growth from 1978, the starting year of the reform and opening-up policy, has fundamentally lifted life quality of 1.3 billion Chinese, who are now able to enjoy the "global village" thanks to the advanced telecom infrastructure.

However, Chinese people also ever went through the time when writing letters was the most frequent means to contact with faraway relatives, when sending a telegram was the only alternative for an urgent message, when a city's public telephone booths were crammed with homesick people, and when holding a brick-size cellular phone was a symbol of nouveau riche.

Times have changed. The improving telecom industry over the past decades has made a radical change in terms of communication means that can never have been imagined. Mobile phone users in China reached 1.42 billion in 2017. The mobile broadband users and those surfing the Internet with cellphones respectively arrived at 1.13 billion and 750 million by the end of 2017, 4.9 times and 1.8 times more than those numbers in 2012.

In the following years, China's telecom industry is expected to continue to run parallel with China's rapid development.

A passenger talks with her friend through a phone video call using 4G network on a bullet train from Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, to Jiangshan, east China's Zhejiang Province, Feb. 4, 2015. High-speed railways in Anhui started to offer 4G service to passengers during the Spring Festival travel rush in 2015. [Xinhua/Du Yu]

Chen Yu, a Chinese graduate working in Bangkok, talks with his girl friend, who stays in China, via a video call at his home in Bangkok, Thailand, June 12, 2016. [Xinhua/Li Mangmang]

(Source: Xinhua)