routes, the problem of delivering mail to places below the county level was solved by enlisting the aid of the population. From 1954 onward a system of mail delivery by rural postal workers was tried in agricultural cooperatives, and in 1956 this system was extended throughout the country. By 1959 the national postal network was complete. Postal service was administered by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (now the Ministry of Information Industry), which was established in 1949 and reestablished in 1973 after a two-year period during which the postal and telecommunications functions had been separated and the ministry downgraded to a subministerial level. In 1984 China had 53,000 post and telecommunications offices and 5 million kilometers of postal routes, including 240,000 kilometers of railroad postal routes, 624,000 kilometers of highway postal routes, and 230,000 kilometers of airmail routes. By 1985 post offices were handling 4.7 billion first-class letters and 25 billion newspapers and periodicals. In 1987, after a six-year hiatus, six-digit postal codes were ordered to be put into use. For many years, China was not a member of the Universal Postal Union, and while using Arabic numerals for the denominations, did not include the country's name in Latin letters as required of UPU nations. The addition of "CHINA" to stamps' inscriptions began in 1992. Western collectors typically differentiate earlier stamps both by the serial numbers in the lower corner, and by the first character of the country name 中, the "square box with a vertical bar" being visually distinct from the inscription used by any other Asian country. See also China Post, national postal service. List of postal codes in China Local postal surcharge labels China Philatelic Society of London China Stamp Society Chinese Golden Monkey stamp Chinese postal romanization Murray Collection Postage stamps and postal history of Taiwan Postage stamps and postal history of Hong Kong Postage stamps and postal history of Macau Revenue stamps of China Sun Yat-sen stamps References Citations Further reading Harris, Lane J. "Stumbling towards empire: the Shanghai Local Post Office, the transnational British community and informal empire in China, 1863–97." Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46.3 (2018): 418-445. Harris, Lane. "The Post office and state formation in modern China, 1896-1949" (PhD. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012) Online. Wang, Chelsea Zi. "More Haste, Less Speed: Sources of Friction in the Ming Postal System." Late Imperial China 40.2 (2019): 89-140. Sources