About China Post News

China Post News

China Post News (Chinese: 中国邮政报; pinyin: Zhongguo Youzheng Bao) is a Chinese-language newspaper published in Beijing as the organ paper of China's national postal administration, today operating within the China Post Group system. It covers postal policy and regulation, the universal postal service, express and logistics operations, postal savings and the vast network of urban and rural post offices across China. Read by postal officials, enterprise managers and frontline postal workers, it reports on service standards, rural delivery, philately and the modernisation of China Post as the group has expanded from letters into parcels, logistics and financial services. It is the newspaper of record for one of the world's largest postal systems.

Not the China Post of Taiwan

The name requires one clarification, because two very different publications can be confused in English. China Post News, the subject of this profile, is the mainland Chinese postal system's own newspaper, written in Chinese for the staff and managers of China Post. It is not The China Post of Taiwan, which was an English-language daily newspaper published in Taipei — a separate publication, with separate ownership, a separate history and a separate readership, that has nothing to do with the postal service of the People's Republic of China. Nothing in this profile draws on the Taiwan paper's record. China Post News belongs instead to the institutional press of mainland China: a sector organ whose subject is the postal enterprise itself.

An organ paper inside the China Post Group

Within the China Post system, publishing is an organised group function. Reference accounts of the China Post Group Corporation's structure list a China Post News Press among the group's units, alongside bodies such as the China Post Culture and History Center — which houses the China National Post and Postage Stamp Museum — the China National Philatelic Corporation and the group's trade union. That placement explains the newspaper's character. It is produced inside the enterprise it covers, for readers who work in that enterprise: postal officials who set and implement policy, managers who run provincial and local operations, and frontline workers in post offices and delivery networks. Its reporting on the group's decisions is therefore authoritative in the way an internal organ is — it is where the system explains itself to itself, and where service standards, campaigns and reforms are communicated down to the counter and the delivery route.

The postal service behind the newspaper

The enterprise the paper serves has deep institutional roots. The current postal service of the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, replacing the Chunghwa Post in mainland China, and China Post took up China's place in the Universal Postal Union in 1972. For much of the period after 1949 the postal service was both operator and administrator of the sector — a dual role that shaped the world China Post News originally reported. The State Post Bureau, the sub-ministry-level government agency that regulates the national postal industry, has shared an office with China Post, and China Post has been directly supervised by it. Understanding the newspaper means understanding that transition: it began as the voice of a government postal administration and became the organ of a state-owned commercial group, as the functions of regulating the market and running the business were progressively separated.

The 2007 reform: separating regulator and operator

The decisive step came with the postal system reform scheme issued by the State Council in August 2005. On 29 January 2007 the State Post Management Bureau and the China Post Group Corporation officially began operation, marking the separation of the regulatory functions of the former State Post Bureau from its business activities. The management bureau took the government functions — supervising the postal sector in accordance with state laws — while the China Post Group, a solely state-owned firm with registered capital of 80 billion yuan (about 10 billion US dollars at the time), took over the businesses, including reforming postal and postal savings services. Contemporary reporting noted that the group would own the postal air freight corporation and the new postal savings bank, and that the merger of the postal logistics corporation with the express mail service was almost complete. For the newspaper, the reform redefined its subject: from then on it reported on a corporation expected to operate commercially, inside a market supervised by a separate regulator.

Restructuring into China Post Group Corporation Limited in 2019

The group's corporate form was modernised again a decade later. According to China Post Group's official English-language About page, with the approval of the State Council the group was officially restructured into China Post Group Corporation Limited in December 2019, a solely state-owned enterprise incorporated in accordance with the Company Law of the People's Republic of China. The group has a Party group, a board of directors and executives, but no board of shareholders; the Ministry of Finance performs the contributor's duties on behalf of the State Council in accordance with national laws and administrative regulations. The group engages in postal business in accordance with the law, undertakes the obligations of providing universal postal services, offers special postal services as entrusted by the government, and conducts commercial operation of competitive postal businesses. That three-way formula — universal service as an obligation, special services on government entrustment, and competitive business on commercial terms — is the framework within which the newspaper's coverage of the group is set.

Universal service: the obligation at the centre of its beat

Universal service is the public-service heart of the postal system and a constant theme of the paper. Postal regulatory profiles record that China Post Group Corporation Limited is the country's universal service provider, with the status of a state-owned enterprise, and that the Postal Law stipulates that the state shall subsidise the universal postal services and special services provided by postal enterprises and shall strengthen supervision over the use of subsidy funds. The universal service obligation covers the delivery of correspondence, printed matter up to 5 kilograms, parcels up to 10 kilograms, and postal remittances, and the Universal Postal Service Standard sets requirements for its timeliness, accuracy, safety, convenience and universality. In a country of China's geography, that obligation means maintaining delivery to rural and remote communities where purely commercial operators might not go — one reason the newspaper gives sustained attention to rural delivery, service standards and the condition of the post-office network that carries the obligation.

From letters to parcels, logistics and e-commerce

The group's official business scope, as set out on its About page, shows how far beyond letters its work — and therefore the newspaper's coverage — now extends. The group operates in a diversified way focused on universal services, parcel, express and logistics business, financial business and rural e-commerce. Its business scope includes domestic and international letter business, domestic and international express parcel business, distribution of newspapers, journals and books, stamp issuance, postal remittance services, confidential correspondence, postal financial business, postal logistics, e-commerce and various postal agency services, together with other businesses stipulated by the state. Two items in that list have a particular resonance for a postal newspaper: China Post is itself one of China's great distributors of newspapers and journals, carrying other publishers' titles through its network, even as its own organ paper records the system's life from inside. Reporting on express and logistics operations also places the paper at the centre of China's parcel economy, where the state operator competes and cooperates with private couriers serving the country's e-commerce trade.

Postal finance and the Postal Savings Bank

Finance is the group's second great pillar, and a major strand of the paper's reporting. Post offices in China began providing postal savings services in 1986, initially accepting deposits; the reform of the postal system then turned that savings operation into a bank. The Postal Savings Bank of China is listed among China Post's subsidiaries, together with China Postal Airlines and the China National Philatelic Corporation. The bank was carved out of the postal system to take over the postal savings business, and it combines its own branches with a far larger network of post-office agency outlets, giving it a presence in county towns and villages that most other banks lack; it is retail-oriented, serving household deposits, consumer and mortgage loans, small-business and agricultural lending, cards and wealth management. The group structure also includes a postal life insurance business. For readers of China Post News, postal finance is not a side story: counter staff across the network handle savings, remittance and agency financial services as part of daily postal work, and the newspaper follows the development of those services alongside mail and parcels.

Philately, distribution and the rural network

Stamp issuance is one of the group's statutory businesses, and philately has its own dedicated institution in the China National Philatelic Corporation, with the group's culture and history centre preserving the record in the China National Post and Postage Stamp Museum. The newspaper's coverage of philately — new issues, collecting and the postal museum — serves both employees and the collecting public who follow China Post's stamps. Equally central is the physical network itself: the urban and rural post offices through which universal service, newspaper and journal distribution, remittances and financial agency services all reach the public. The paper reports on that network's modernisation — how counters, delivery routes and rural outlets adapt as letter volumes give way to parcels, logistics and rural e-commerce, the business line the group lists among its diversified operations. In that sense its pages document a network in transition while remaining, for the people who staff it, a professional newspaper.

Scale, standing and significance

The scale of the system behind the paper is stated plainly by the group itself: in 2024 China Post Group Corporation Limited ranked 83rd in the Fortune Global 500 and first among postal companies in the world, according to its official About page. China Post News is significant not because of a general newsstand readership — it does not seek one — but because of its position inside that system. It is the authoritative internal record of China's postal policy as applied, of the universal service obligation in operation, of the express, logistics and financial businesses into which the old letter post has grown, and of the workforce that staffs post offices from the largest cities to rural townships. For officials, managers, frontline postal workers and researchers of the sector, it remains the postal system's newspaper of record in China.